A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
Lev Perlmutter, an assimilated, cultured German Jew, enlists to fight in World War I, leaving behind his gentile wife, Josephine, and their children, Franz and Vicki. Moving between Lev’s and Josephine’s points of view, the first part of the novel focuses on Lev’s experiences on the Eastern Front—both in war and in love—which render his life at home a pale aftermath by comparison. The second part of the novel takes us to Berlin, 1927–28. Now young adults, the Perlmutter children grapple with their own questions: Franz, drawn into the Nazi brown shirt movement, struggles with his unexpressed homosexuality; Vicki, seduced by the Jazz Age and everything new, bobs her hair and falls in love with a young man who wants to take her to Palestine.
Unlike many historical novels of its kind, The Empire of the Senses is not about the Holocaust but about the juxtaposition of events that led to it, and about why it was unimaginable to ordinary people like Lev and his wife. Plotted with meticulous precision and populated with characters who feel and dream to the fullest, it holds us rapt as the tides of cultural loss and ethnic hatred come to coexist with those of love, passion, and the power of the human spirit.
Praise for “The Empire Of The Senses”
“Elegantly crafted and psychologically astute...compelling ....Such stunning imagery is interwoven with pitch-perfect and often spare dialogue, creating a doubly vivid resonance.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Richly appointed . . . functions as a kind of extended séance, conjuring up the look and feel of experiences from the glamorous—a decadent party in Weimar Berlin—to the arduous—a field hospital on the Eastern Front . . . . In scene after scene, settings and objects and people are described in meticulous and usually attractive terms . . . . The destruction of their world makes Landau’s evocation of its fleeting beauty all the more poignant.”
—Tablet
“Vivid . . . Landau evokes the Weimar Republic era with spellbinding detail and nuance, deftly capturing the zeitgeist in the characters’ colorful pursuits . . . . Lev’s struggle with his Jewish identity is also fascinating.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A top-notch literary saga with a gripping plotline . . . Each perfectly crafted individual is fully involved in the surrounding world. In Landau’s hands, even a simple trip to the barber becomes meaningful and illustrative of the novel’s themes. The characters’ actions and thoughts are so three-dimensionally human that readers may forget they’re reading fiction.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Landau’s debut is lush, smart, sexy, affecting, interesting, beautifully researched, and well made. Spending time in the world of this novel is an absolute pleasure.”
—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“A gripping, beautifully written saga of an ordinary German family’s slow immersion into the simmering cauldron that is Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Like most of us, the characters in this novel make choices determined by love and desire; their personal secrets and preoccupations often loom larger than the encroaching danger. Ultimately, their fates are determined as much by their passions as by history. As the novel builds toward its riveting conclusion, Landau explores how the unimaginable can become real—and in the process offers a fresh and moving perspective on a piece of history we thought we already knew.”
—Christina Baker Kline, New York Times #1 best-selling author of Orphan Train