From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
Before the Feast is a slow and careful series of vignettes about mysterious happenings and beautifully written characters in a small German town. Recommended By Lonnan R., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
It’s the evening before the feast in the village of Fürstenfelde (population: an odd number). The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman—he’s dead. And Mrs. Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells—the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than to quit smoking.
Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football jerseys bump into one another. They all want to bring something to a close, on this night before the feast.
Review
"Before the Feast is a big book in every sense: it’s vibrant, compassionate, and knowing. Stanišić channels an almost reckless energy into a novel that’s at once sprawling and controlled." Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books on the Park
Review
"A book like few others. Politically well-versed and stylistically a work of art." DIE ZEIT
Review
"Serious subjects are raised throughout this impressive and sweeping portrait, including our relationship to history and the responsibility of remembering the past, but this comic novel never takes itself too seriously. The end result is both redemptive and hilarious." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A brilliant, quirky entertainment." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"A village fully in the present, yet rife with legends. In Before The Feast, this villagetells its own story―a novel as compelling multi-voiced chorale put in prose." Leipzig Book Fair Jury Prize
Review
"We are glad. We are ecstatic, actually. We have an honest-to-God wordsmith in Saša Stanišić’. Only seldom does a work of literature embody the lyrical and the realistic simultaneously, the specific and the universal simultaneously, the body and the soul of the world, simultaneously. Stanišić”s prose captures the official narrative and the myth, the dream and the rumor, the hearsay, all of it. It captures how we humans see what we later dare to call reality. I love it." Ismet Pric, author of Shards
Synopsis
Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast.
About the Author
SAŠA STANIŠIC´ was born in 1978 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and currently lives in Germany. His award-winning debut How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has been translated into 32 languages. Before the Feast was a bestseller in Germany and won the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize.