Synopses & Reviews
Karl Bazinger, a sophisticated Wehrmacht officer, is living the high-life in Occupied Paris. With his French girlfriend, his glamorous dinner companions (Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, and a woman suspected of being a spy for the British), and his open disdain for the Nazis, he begins to attract the attention of the SS, and is drawn into further trouble when he receives a suspicious visit from Hans, his best friend from Saxony, who may be involved in Resistance activities. To lower his profile, Karl requests a transfer to the Eastern front, and sets off on a journey into a very different experience of war.
As a terrible fate for Hans is sealed, Karl is posted to Kiev, where he discovers the extent of the Nazi atrocities in the region and begins to suffer from a mysterious nervous ailment. In the novel's final twist, the ministrations of an "enemy" doctor a beautiful, stoic Russian woman with her own painful history will heal Karl and offer him a vital connection to hope and goodness in the midst of hell.
The Year Is '42 communicates the enormity of war with immediacy and intelligence, capturing the myriad gradations of moral position that war demands of those who serve as well as those who resist. Urbane, subtle, elegiac, it is a small masterpiece.
Review
"Bielski tells Karl's story with an almost sketch-like quality, conjuring vivid details of his life, or fragments of scenes, and then quickly moving him along....[T]he shift from a nostalgia-heavy view of Paris to a Kiev characterized by violence and paranoia is heart wrenching. Bielski illuminates the preciously ordinary moments of average people under the extreme duress of war, and she does it with an elegiac kind of beauty." Anna Godbersen, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)