Why read The Tortoises?

Book cover of The Tortoises

Book description

A renowned writer and his wife live quietly in a beautiful villa outside Vienna, until the triumphant Nazis start subjecting their Jewish "hosts" to ever greater humiliations. Veza Canetti focuses on seemingly ordinary people to epitomize the horror: one flag-happy German kills a sparrow before a group of little children;…

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Literary fiction

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Tortoises as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Author

Roaming turtles are branded with swastikas and Nazi soldiers burn synagogues to the ground in Veza Canetti’s The Tortoises, which follows Eva and her husband Andreas, who are trapped in the country without departure visas.

Informed by her experience of the time and place (Canetti wrote the novel shortly after she herself left Vienna in 1938), Canetti paints a vivid and terrible picture of life under Nazi occupation. Published posthumously many years after her death, the novel’s road to publication is a story in and of itself.

From Kirsten's list on The best books on love, loss, and logic in 1930s Vienna.