The New York Times Book Review - Dennis Bock
Behrens captures his narrator's naïveté and the casual anti-Semitism of the times with great skill and intelligence.
Publishers Weekly
12/21/2015
Behrens (The Law of Dreams) grounds his bittersweet escape-from-the-Nazis love story in seascapes, landscapes, and cityscapes, showing how culture and geography shape lives and determine character. The novel consists of Billy Lange’s diary, along with assorted clippings and correspondence beginning in 1882, when Billy’s grandfather Heinrich (known as Captain Jack) registers his sea-born son Heinrich (Buck) as a German citizen who grows up to become the German-Jewish Baron von Weinbrenner’s racing skipper. Buck’s son—named Hermann but known as Billy—grows up on the Baron’s Isle of Wight retreat, his closest companion the Baron’s daughter, Karin. During World War I, Buck is arrested and interned, while Billy and his mother move first to London, then Ireland. After the war, the Baron’s patronage brings them to Germany. Karin enjoys Berlin nightlife, and Billy has unexpected prosperity working as a translator. But with Hitler on the rise, and the aging Baron unable to safeguard his family, employees, or possessions, Billy plans to escape with Karin. In scenes such as the Baron’s funeral and a zeppelin raid, Behrens avoids sentimentality, evoking instead a subtle emotional mix. Likewise, good guys providing protection from bad guys find it more challenging than in old-fashioned westerns, and triumph over tragedy proves more complicated than in traditional family sagas. Behrens thereby revitalizes the war epic, substituting grand panoramas with realistic settings and great acts of heroism with small yet powerful acts of compassion. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
"Carry Me is a moving meditation on identity and belonging, and a love story to get happily lost in." —Montreal Gazette
"Behrens captures his narrator’s naïveté and the casual anti-Semitism of the times with great skill and intelligence . . . as true an observation about human nature as there is." —Dennis Bock, The New York Times Book Review
"Peter Behrens is a powerful stylist . . . if exile is Behrens’s obsession, he’s still making it work in his fiction." —The Globe and Mail
Carry Me is "staggeringly epic." —Toronto Star
“[CARRY ME] is both poetry and cartography. . . . Behrens has mined truths so skillfully that in reading they can slip by unnoticed; they’re never glaring or contrived. They leave the reader with a feeling Billy describes as he’s driving across Germany. . . . Great writing keeps readers on this threshold, in liminal space, wanting to know and understand more than literature or life will allow, anxious for the next big lesson. CARRY ME is full of this kind of searching, characters looking for a way to map their lives against war and love and change.”
—Heidi Sistare, Portland Press Herald
"Behrens is a beautiful, lyric writer. His understanding of the age and command of it, moment to moment, is impressive . . . everything is beautiful in the details, in the smallness of personal moments even as we know that no matter how calm, how peaceful the moment, it will not last."
—Jason Sheehan, NPR
“Carry Me's perspective on war's tragedies is beautifully composed, and heartbreakingly credible.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Behrens is so fine at both sweeping and granular evocations of history, so good at vividly and economically painting his minor players...[his] prose thrills to the indelible and irrevocable.”
—Washington Post
“Make[s] the past feel stunningly close at hand.”
—Vogue.com
“Stunning imagery and fully realized characters…Timely in its depiction of North America as the mythical land of hope for so many, and timeless in its exploration of the effects of bigotry and the power of love…a brilliant and entertaining read.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The story's essence is the relationship between kindred spirits Karin and Billy, but its fascination lies in the backdrop of Europe's upheaval. Set in England and Germany and moving between World War I and the rise of the Nazis, the book tracks the way allegiances shift during wartime and the devastating impact of being ‘othered,’ and not just its impact on Jews…The tension and the expertly drawn portrait of Europe at war make this novel a winner.”
—Now Magazine
“Vividly imagined . . . This ambitious novel provides a panoramic view of a continent and a microscopic view of two individuals hovering precariously between the two World Wars . . . Moving seamlessly back and forth between times and countries, Behrens paints a stunningly intimate portrait in wide, universal strokes.”
—Booklist
Library Journal
09/01/2015
The author of The Law of Dreams, which received Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 2006, returns with another significant historical saga, set in Europe between the world wars.
Kirkus Reviews
2015-12-07
Behrens (The O'Briens, 2011, etc.) again casts his searching eye over the interaction of history and personal destiny, following two families from Edwardian England to Nazi Germany. Billy Lange and Karin Weinbrenner are born a year apart on the Isle of Wight, at the summer home maintained year-round by Billy's parents for Karin's wealthy German-Jewish father. This accident of geography gives Billy and Karin British passports and a means of escape when, three decades later, they are lovers in Germany watching with horrified disbelief as the Nazis make racist street violence an everyday event. Billy's narrative of that grim year, 1938, begins immediately following his account of his birth and alternates with the chronicle of his deepening relationship with Karin as the two grow up. Their idyllic childhood is shattered by World War I. Billy's father, the son of a German sea captain, is arrested as a spy and interned, then deported in 1919. Behrens quietly makes the point that brutality and xenophobia are regrettably universal human traits, though their manifestation in Nazi thugs is more apocalyptic than the routine cruelty of British bureaucrats. Baron von Weinbrenner, his Isle of Wight residence now confiscated, provides refuge and employment for the Langes at his estate outside Frankfurt. Behrens' sensitive insights into the human heart are evident in his characterizations. The baron, an old-school patriot who insists to the end that "Germany was his country, not [the Nazis']," is particularly poignant, but Billy's stinging self-portrait of an honorable man not quite brave enough to raise his voice against the growing madness is also powerful and disturbing. Regrettably, free-spirited Karin is more schematic, as is the uninteresting obsession with the Winnetou novels of Karl May that takes her and Billy to wintry New Mexico for a denouement that feels overly staged, though unquestionably sad. There's no doubt about Behrens' talent, but the tragic romance at the novel's center doesn't equal the power of his sobering meditations on the fragility of human decency.