Review: The Undertaking - Audrey Magee

Desperate to escape the Eastern front, Peter Faber, an ordinary German soldier, marries Katharina Spinell, a woman he has never met; it is a marriage of convenience that promises 'honeymoon' leave for him and a pension for her should he die on the front. With ten days' leave secured, Peter visits his new wife in Berlin; both are surprised by the attraction that develops between them.

When Peter returns to the horror of the front, it is only the dream of Katharina that sustains him as he approaches Stalingrad. Back in Berlin, Katharina, goaded on by her desperate and delusional parents, ruthlessly works her way into the Nazi party hierarchy, wedding herself, her young husband and their unborn child to the regime. But when the tide of war turns and Berlin falls, Peter and Katharina, ordinary people stained with their small share of an extraordinary guilt, find their simple dream of family increasingly hard to hold on to.

My thoughts:

This book felt realistic, I did not know what to expect after their first meeting when they fell in love. But after that things fell apart and real life began.

War is hell, people are animals. Rape, murder, senseless violence. It's not pretty, no country's soldiers are angels.

And with that I will begin. Katharina and Peter meet through a catalog. He gets to come back from the front, marry and have a honeymoon and making babies for the glorious empire. They do like each other and survive by thinking of each other. But, then life happens.

Peter is marching through a cold and bitter Russia. Hunger, the cold, lice and then Stalingrad. But he was indoctrinated before he left Berlin and it takes a long long time before he for a moment doubt that they are something else than canon fodder and why the hell they want Russia for.

Katharina is left in Berlin and she does have it better as her father helps someone with contacts. But she will have her own hell at the end. When hunger comes, when doubts emerges and when the Russians descend.

Conclusion:

It was a good book. It makes you feel cold and hungry and you will feel the lice crawling everywhere.

Hardcover, 304 pages
Expected publication: February 6th 2014 by Atlantic Books
Fiction
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