Product Description

Germany, 1975. Two women near the end of their lives come together at the bedside of an old man, after having spent the last fifty years vying for first place in his heart. While one of the 20th century's greatest minds slumbers in the grip of nightmares, the two enemies sit in a nearby room and declare a truce. One is the man's wife, a woman who has always played her role as the devoted mother and the obedient, bourgeois Hausfrau to the Great Man and the tyrannical husband. The other is his former student and lover, nearly twenty years his junior. She is the Jewish intellectual consumed by her clear-sightedness.He is the brilliant and famous philosopher, now tormented by his Nazi past. In this wide-ranging score, each performer has an individual theme, yet each shares some of the notes of the others. But, above all, this fugue for three voices reveals the mark of the greatest tragedy of the century: for the characters are Martin Heidegger, his wife Elfriede, and Hannah Arendt. Catherine Clement skilfully paints a chiaroscuro portrait of forbidden love, recreating a famous love affair while turning the subtle intricacies of philosophy into memorable, enduring fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1923551 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.12" h x 6.27" w x 9.31" l, 1.38 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 310 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Cl‚ment is a French literary journalist familiar with the often abstruse codes used by prominent French intellectuals. She has spent the second phase of her career extending her popularizing talents into fiction. In her latest novel to be translated here, she tackles the adulterous tryst between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The novel opens with Hannah visiting the Master for the last time, in 1975, and proceeds to shuffle between the stagy dialogue produced by Hannah and Elfriede, Heidegger's wife, and scenes from Arendt's and Heidegger's past, both as Arendt remembers it and as Martin, shown lapsing into a perhaps senile stupor, dreams it. Hannah thinks that Elfriede was responsible for Heidegger's terrible lapse his embrace of Nazism in the '30s, culminating in the infamous rector's speech at the University of Freiburg in 1933. Elfriede, who was indeed the first Nazi in the family, having taken up with the Party in the '20s, insists that Heidegger made his own choices. Elfriede naturally considers Hannah a disruptive influence, while seeing her own role as successfully creating a stable atmosphere within which Heidegger could think. Cl‚ment plays with the idea that the contrasting roles of Hannah and Elfriede are reflected, in Being and Time, as the difference between Being and Care. Unfortunately, spritzing Judith Krantz-like romance over Being and Time does not work well, and the interplay between Martin's two aging women veers from stereotypical melodrama (the other woman and the wounded wife) to pop philosophy considerations of Time. In the end, neither Arendt nor Heidegger are served well by this effort.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Two old women reach an uneasy truce in 1975 as the elder allows the younger to enter her house to see her ailing husband. In Clement's fictionalized account of a historic love triangle, Elfriede Heidegger lets Hannah Arendt visit with her husband, famed philosopher Martin Heidegger, although Hannah is the "other woman." She has made this pilgrimage to see her old flame in spite of the fact that he betrayed her by joining the Nazi party while Hannah, a Jew, was forced to flee her German homeland and suffer incarceration in a camp in France before escaping to the U.S. The two women repair to the kitchen to reminisce, each trying to top the other as to how much she influenced Martin in his great work, Elfriede by providing an ideal home atmosphere and Hannah with her passion and intellect. Clement imaginatively portrays two great thinkers of the twentieth century, and insightfully reconciles how a Jew and a Nazi could still remain friends after the Holocaust. Patty Engelmann
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"... imaginatively portrays two great thinkers of the twentieth century, and insightfully reconciles how a Jew and a Nazi could still remain friends after the Holocaust." -- Booklist