Eva Menasse Vienna Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, February 2005. 432 pp. ISBN 3-462-03465-0 This impressive debut presents a vivid panorama of family life, populated by a host of memorable characters. Take the narrator’s father. He was born, as described in our extract on page 19, at the end of a game of bridge, as his mother ignored her labour pains in order to play her last card. She, for her part, was an indomitable lady, kept in fur coats by her rich but adulterous husband who suffered pangs of conscience for his numerous affairs. His sister married a pleasant but dull-witted bank manager, whose verbal infelicities rivalled those of Mrs Malaprop and went down in family history – ‘a snake in wolf’s clothing’ being a much quoted favourite. Their son was an inveterate fraudster. These and other lively characters fill the pages of Vienna, which traces the colourful history of a Jewish-Austrian family, by way of the Nazi takeover in Austria and the gruelling campaign of the British army in Burma. The story, covering three generations, starts at the point where the female narrator’s father is sent with his brother to England before the start of World War II, where the two boys are separated, and from then on the narrative moves excitingly back and forth, throwing up, beneath its surface, discussion of some of the major issues of our time: the nature of Jewishness, the nature of intolerance (for victims of intolerance can be intolerant in their turn), and so on. Another intriguing theme is the uncertainty of origins, symbolised in the case of the two expatriated brothers, who speak in a mixture of Viennese and English. And then there is the question of the grandmother’s origins. She is in fact a Moravian, hailing from the Sudetenland, and not a Jew. So is the family really Jewish? The racy and entertaining dialogue, the sharp observation of character, above all the wit and the warmth announce an impressive new and inventive talent on the scene. This book is absorbing, and Menasse is a writer to watch.