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Eifelheim (Audio Cassette)

by Michael Flynn (Author), Anthony Heald (Narrator)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

List Price:	CDN$ 63.97
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Product Details

Audio Cassette
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks; Unabridged edition (July 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1433206102
ISBN-13: 978-1433206108
Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 17.5 x 6.4 cm
Shipping Weight: 613 g

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A present-day scientific odd couple who are longtime domestic partners, physicist Sharon Nagy and historian Tom Schwoerin, look into the fate of the Black Forest village of the title, which apparently vanished in the plague year 1348, in Flynn's heartbreaking morality play of stranded aliens in medieval Germany. Most of the narrative focuses on the consequences of the discovery in the 14th century by Eifelheim's pastor, Father Dietrich, of a crashed space ship carrying the "Krenken," horrific grasshopperlike aliens. Despite Inquisitorial threats, Dietrich befriends, baptizes and attempts to help the aliens return home. Flynn (The Wreck of the River of Stars) masterfully achieves an intricate panorama of medieval life, full of fascinatingly realized human and Krenken characters whose fates interconnect with poignant irony. Through human frailties, the very Christianity by which Dietrich hopes to save Krenken souls dooms them all. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile

Tom, a historian, enlists the assistance of his longtime partner, Sharon, a scientist, to solve a fourteenth-century mystery revolving around a ghost town and stained-glass windows depicting strange creatures and medieval manuscripts. Did intergalactic travelers land in the German Black Forest? Did their visit lead to the Plague that swept Europe? Anthony Heald is an engaged narrator who gives the impression that he, like you, is puzzling out an explanation that will make sense of all of these events. He sounds enthusiastic and somber, curious and convinced. His presentation of the intellectual exchanges between Tom and Sharon is quietly vibrant and grounds this thriller in the modern day. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books of 2006, May 4 2007

By	Donna McKinnon "Donna M" (Edmonton) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Eifelheim (Hardcover)

I feel sorry for genre writers. Great novels can be lost to snobbery. Perhaps I should clarify. Great novels may be lost to me because of my snobbery. I am speaking specifically of Science Fiction. Perhaps it's the metallic covers, or the possibility that someone, at some point, is going to get probed. Not for me. However, sometimes these things are out of our hands. As a lifelong reader and as someone who used to work in a bookstore, I can confidently state that books find us, not the other way around. If we are meant to read a book, it will show up in a friend's hand, or be conspicuous on a shelf, or, as in my case, be reviewed in a magazine I happen to be reading. The review for Eifelheim was short but the premise intriguing. A mathematician, Tom Schwoerin, discovers a geographical anomaly in the Black Forest area of 14th century Germany. A town disappeared and was never resettled. As a cliologist or mathematical historian, he becomes interested. Patterns of resettlement are predictable, even areas devastated by the plague. "People lived there for over 400 years, and then no-one ever lived there again." Tom's girlfriend, Sharon Nagy, is a theoretical physicist researching `the multiverse', which has something to do with the space-time continuum and the inside of a balloon. Suffice to say I read Eifelheim with a German dictionary and Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror by my side, but I gave the physics stuff a pass. Tom and Sharon's obsessions, his historical, hers almost comically obtuse, are unintentionally parallel pursuits headed for collision more than 600 years in the past, to Oberhochwald, as Eifelheim was known then, a medieval village not unlike other villages of its size in Europe, but very much unlike others in that it's the site of an alien crash landing in 1348. This is the part where people like myself start rolling their eyes and making snotty comments about the kind people who read this, well, martian stuff. Just to get it out there, yes they have green skin, six fingers, and 6 billion mile stares, but if Kurt Vonnegut can include the occasional visitor from Tralfamadore in his novels, which granted, has disappointed some readers, why not extend the same latitude to other so-called `serious' writers?
The story alternates between the contemporary and the medieval, the latter as seen through the eyes of the local priest, Father Dietrich. He is an intellectual, educated in Paris and fluent in philosophical discourse, but he is also, rather charmingly, a man of his time. Curious about the creatures and quick to engage them in conversation and debate, which is translated by the their computer, he matter-of-factly deduces the strange machine must be a heinzelmannchen, a `little man' in a box.
The villagers don't fear the aliens, or Krenken, as they are called, as beings from another world because they have no concept of `other worlds.' They fear them as they might fear any stranger in war-torn, pestilence ridden Europe-as a potential threat to home and hearth. Some react with superstition, demonizing and blaming the aliens for the plague, creeping inexorably toward Oberhochwald, much as those elsewhere blame the Jews. But the truly fascinating element of this part of the story lay not in what could have been a stereotypically xenophobic response to uninvited guests, especially guests that resemble grasshoppers, but in the way the villagers and the Krenken begin to embrace one another.
But as with any disparate population forced to co-exist, they both influence and confound. Alien technology, little understood, is nevertheless enlisted to spy on war parties gathering nearby. As winter approaches and the cold threatens to kill the thin-skinned aliens, the locals invite them in, thus initiating the `pilgrims' into village life, which for some, includes baptism. By Spring, `it seemed as if the Krenken had always been there', settling into the `rivalries, rhythms, friendships, and jealousies that marked village and manor.' The details are rich, the relationships complex. Michael Flynn has done his research and we as readers are rewarded with a masterful depiction of everyday life in the Middle Ages. But this is the 14th century and the world is on the precipice of destruction.
Facing starvation and desperate to leave, some of the Krenken misinterpret Christian salvation as a literal rescue from their predicament. "What means salvation to you?" asks Father Dietrich to one of the Krenken. "That we should be taken from this world to the next, and so to our home beyond the stars, when your lord-from-the-sky-at last on Easter comes."
As the plague, or `the pest' as it is called, begins to decimate Oberhochwald, a distraught alien named Gottfried questions the Priest, "Wherefore did we pray His aid?" Dietrich shakes his head, "All men die when God calls them back to Himself." Gottfried answers, "Could he not have called more softly?"
Connection is a strong theme in Eifelheim. Ancient and contemporary worlds run parallel, fates are woven together in extraordinary, heartbreaking ways, and the universe itself may be more knowable than we could possibly imagine.
"It is no comfort," says one of the aliens, "...but there is no other manner in which the world could be fashioned that would bear life. There are...numbers. We have shown that these numbers could be no other. The smallest change in any and the world would not stand. All that happens in the world follows from these numbers: sky, stars, sun and moon, rain and snow, plants and animals and small-lives. And from those numbers come also ills and afflictions and death and the pest. Yet had the Herr in the sky ordered the world in any other way, there would be no life at all."

Eifelheim is an elegant, and moving novel, and I'm very grateful that fate interceded on my behalf and prevented this science fiction snob from missing a truly great story.
And not a probe in sight.

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