In the Place Where We Thought We Stood - by Peter Nash (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the Place Where We Thought We Stood tells the story of a French-American translator travelling by train from Paris to Barcelona, then on to Madrid to comfort his mother-in-law who recently suffered a stroke. Haunted by his wife's recent suicide and by his inability to complete his translation of the correspondence of the writer Ingeborg Bachmann and her lover Paul Celan, he struggles numbly to make sense of the moment, the day. Set entirely in the course of this journey, the novel-at heart a reckoning with things past-explores the fleeting little triumphs of love.

Review Quotes

"Peter Nash takes us on a classic European train journey, from Gare de Lyon to Barcelona, imbued with the vivid smells and sounds which transport us through the history of art, wars, and philosophical observations. In places, I felt haunted by the ghosts of Thomas Bernhard, Albert Camus, and Joseph Roth in this stream of consciousness and narrative exploration of a man in search of his lost past. A wonderful ride!"

Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool's Day and Man Booker International Prize Finalist