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The Paper Man
A deeply moving interwar romance set between 1930s Austria and 1980s Ireland, based on a real-life unsolved mystery.
1930s Austria. Vienna is a bustling, cosmopolitan city on the brink of war. Matthias Sindelar is an internationally renowned soccer player known as “The Paper Man” because of his effortless weave across the field. When Sindelar speaks out against Hitler, his fame can’t protect him from being placed under Gestapo surveillance. Meanwhile, Sindelar falls in love with a young Jewish girl named Rebekah. As the atmosphere in Vienna darkens under the Nazi regime, Rebekah flees to relatives in Cork, Ireland. Only after she arrives there does she realize she is pregnant with Sindelar’s child. The following year, at the age of 35, The Paper Man is found dead in his apartment.
1980s Ireland. In the Jewish Quarter of Cork, Rebekah’s son Jack Shine discovers a bundle of German letters and newspaper clippings tied with a ribbon while sorting his mother’s belongings. With the help of his German-speaking father-in-law, Jack translates the letters and attempts to piece together his family history and, hopefully, solve the mystery of his father’s identity.
Based on real people and true events, The Paper Man is the story of twentieth-century Europe, the Holocaust, the cost of fame, and love against the odds.
1930s Austria. Vienna is a bustling, cosmopolitan city on the brink of war. Matthias Sindelar is an internationally renowned soccer player known as “The Paper Man” because of his effortless weave across the field. When Sindelar speaks out against Hitler, his fame can’t protect him from being placed under Gestapo surveillance. Meanwhile, Sindelar falls in love with a young Jewish girl named Rebekah. As the atmosphere in Vienna darkens under the Nazi regime, Rebekah flees to relatives in Cork, Ireland. Only after she arrives there does she realize she is pregnant with Sindelar’s child. The following year, at the age of 35, The Paper Man is found dead in his apartment.
1980s Ireland. In the Jewish Quarter of Cork, Rebekah’s son Jack Shine discovers a bundle of German letters and newspaper clippings tied with a ribbon while sorting his mother’s belongings. With the help of his German-speaking father-in-law, Jack translates the letters and attempts to piece together his family history and, hopefully, solve the mystery of his father’s identity.
Based on real people and true events, The Paper Man is the story of twentieth-century Europe, the Holocaust, the cost of fame, and love against the odds.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published May 2, 2023
About the author
Billy O'Callaghan
15 books307 followersBilly O'Callaghan was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1974. His books include the short story collections: In Exile (2008, Mercier Press), In Too Deep (2008, Mercier Press), and The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind (2013, New Island Books/2017, CITIC Press, China); and a novel: The Dead House (2017, O'Brien Press/Arcade, USA).
His breakthrough novel, My Coney Island Baby, was published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape (UK, Ireland & the Commonwealth) and Harper (USA), as well as in translation by Grasset (France), Ambo Anthos (the Netherlands), btb Verlag (Germany), Paseka (Czech Republic), Ediciones Salamandra (Spain), L’Altra Editorial (Catalonia), Jelenkor (Hungary), Guanda (Italy) and Othello (Turkey). The novel was also shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award.
A new short story collection, The Boatman, and Other Stories was published in 2020 by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Harper Perennial (USA), and is forthcoming from btb Verlag (Germany) and Sefsafa (Egypt - Arabic).
His novel, Life Sentences, published to critical acclaim by Jonathan Cape in January 2021, and reached #3 Irish fiction bestsellers list. 'Life Sentences' was published in Czech translation by Paseka, in French by Christian Bourgois, and in the US in April 2022, by David R. Godine as well as on audiobook by Blackstone. Editions are also forthcoming from btb Verlag (Germany) and Petrine Knjige (Croatia).
His work has been recognised with numerous honours, including Bursary Awards for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Cork County Council, a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award, and Encore Award and Costa Short Story Award shortlistings, and his short stories have appeared in more than 100 magazines and literary journals around the world, including: Agni, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the Kenyon Review, the London Magazine, Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander, the Saturday Evening Post and Winter Papers.
A latest novel, The Paper Man, was published in May 2023 by Jonathan Cape (UK) & Godine (USA), and as an audiobook by Blackstone. A translation into Czech is forthcoming, published by Paseka.
His breakthrough novel, My Coney Island Baby, was published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape (UK, Ireland & the Commonwealth) and Harper (USA), as well as in translation by Grasset (France), Ambo Anthos (the Netherlands), btb Verlag (Germany), Paseka (Czech Republic), Ediciones Salamandra (Spain), L’Altra Editorial (Catalonia), Jelenkor (Hungary), Guanda (Italy) and Othello (Turkey). The novel was also shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award.
A new short story collection, The Boatman, and Other Stories was published in 2020 by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Harper Perennial (USA), and is forthcoming from btb Verlag (Germany) and Sefsafa (Egypt - Arabic).
His novel, Life Sentences, published to critical acclaim by Jonathan Cape in January 2021, and reached #3 Irish fiction bestsellers list. 'Life Sentences' was published in Czech translation by Paseka, in French by Christian Bourgois, and in the US in April 2022, by David R. Godine as well as on audiobook by Blackstone. Editions are also forthcoming from btb Verlag (Germany) and Petrine Knjige (Croatia).
His work has been recognised with numerous honours, including Bursary Awards for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Cork County Council, a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award, and Encore Award and Costa Short Story Award shortlistings, and his short stories have appeared in more than 100 magazines and literary journals around the world, including: Agni, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the Kenyon Review, the London Magazine, Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander, the Saturday Evening Post and Winter Papers.
A latest novel, The Paper Man, was published in May 2023 by Jonathan Cape (UK) & Godine (USA), and as an audiobook by Blackstone. A translation into Czech is forthcoming, published by Paseka.
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March 2, 2023
Matthias Sindelar was an Austrian professional soccer player. He was regarded as one of the greatest soccer players of all time. He was considered the Mozart of football….refusing to represent the Nazi football team. He was nicknamed ‘The Paper Man’ due to his slight build and majestic runs.
The true reasoning behind Sindelar’s untimely and mysterious death at age 35 is unknown but the fact remains that it came soon after his refusal to represent a German National Team.
He was found dead, alongside his girlfriend, Camilla Castagnola, at her Vienna apartment. Official records attribute their deaths to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, rumors persist as murder and suicide.
Sindelar was born in what is now the Czech Republic but was in part of the Austro-Hungarian empire into a catholic family in 1903.
He died in January, 1939 .
O’Callaghan brings us a fictional story with true events ….beginning in
Anschluss, Vienna, in 1938.
It was a game that nobody wanted to miss…. 60,000 tickets were bought ……it was sold out event at Prater Stadium in Leopoldstadt. Crowds were flushing the streets.
The atmosphere around the game created an intense ferocious energy inside and out of the stadium.
Hitler was seated in a box reserved for him.
Nazi Germany force Austrian’s to play for them and lose
Australia’s national team was known as the Wunderteam, but when conscripted ti play Germany, they were less.
“Sindelar will be seen in fullest pomp, which makes this performance so worth savoring. When he runs, even at thirty-five, it is like watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace and musicality, and against it the Germans have no choice but to abandon their strategy of hard tackling and instead fall back, trying, since nothing else is working, to pack the defense with sheer numbers block his route to goal. Still, he glides and slaloms among them, and with scoring seemingly no longer the intent or motivation, every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense”.
Sindelar’s passing and lethal finishing displayed was his trademark, and for three years Austria dominated the world game”.
By the 1930’s Austria had become the best team in the world….earning the sobriquet of Wunderteam.
In the 1980’s, Jack Shine discovered a box of letters—love letters and newspaper clippings that belong to his mother, Rebekah, a young Jewish refugee who came to Cork, Ireland from Vienna, Austria when WWII broke out. She died when Jack was young and Jack never learned of his father’s identity.
Can you imagine finding out that you had a very famous parent you never met? A national treasure in his day… a man who enjoyed fame and riches beyond his contemporaries……a ‘bona fide footballing genius’ ….and whose death (shockingly young) was also the topic of a dark conspiracy theory?
Jack wondered (as I did)….
“Why hadn’t she told him? That is what he struggles with, and what he can’t get over. During the time of war he’d been too young to understand, but by 1949, in those months prior to her death, he was already ten years of age, and old enough to bear the truth, whatever that was”.
Author Billy O’Callagahan (absolutely loved his novel “My Coney Island Baby”), does a phenomenal job bringing us “The Paper Man”…..
It’s a historical fiction story of love against the odds, 20th century Europe, the Holocaust, the cost of fame.
I love when historical novels gets me interested in wanting to know more. And that’s exactly what O’Callaghan did for me.
I was especially moved to learn that at the heart of hearts…..Sindelar — the center-forward of the Wunderteam - (an icon for a masterpiece goal which no one else could have done), was fundamentally opposed to the *Anschluss* [the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. Hitler had forced the resignation of the Austrian chancellor by demanding that he admit Nazis into his cabinet] — but thanks to Sindelar — it remains one of the strangest and most poignant games of football ever played.
So many oddities were associated with a match that took place on April 3, 1938. (Austria was not suppose to win).
There were disagreements about Sindelar’s behavior that day. He missed a number of easy chances in the first half— so much so that many people believe he was deliberately mocking the Nazi Germans. And then — maybe — [diplomacy be damned] not being able to resist the urge any longer — Sindelar did the unthinkable!
When the game ended in victory— Sindelar did a happy dance in front of a VIP box where various Nazi officials were sitting.
Later — instead of surrendering to the pressure to join the new German-Austrian team, Sindelar retired. He bought a cafe from a Jew who as an owner had been forced to give up his business…. choosing to pay the full price rather than a cut-rate, as a non-Jew, Sindelar would’ve been entitled to. His clear distaste for the national government was noted by the Gestapo.
I became soooooo interested in this story.
There are still people who wonder if Sindelar’s death was accidental or death by Gestapo? Personally…..I doubt very much it was an accident.
This is the type of book ….(intimate, powerful, interwoven threads filled marvelous characters and writing), that gets me interested in unsung hero’s, and history. I lost hours of sleep — but it was worth it.
Even reading the acknowledgments made my eyes teary.
The true reasoning behind Sindelar’s untimely and mysterious death at age 35 is unknown but the fact remains that it came soon after his refusal to represent a German National Team.
He was found dead, alongside his girlfriend, Camilla Castagnola, at her Vienna apartment. Official records attribute their deaths to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, rumors persist as murder and suicide.
Sindelar was born in what is now the Czech Republic but was in part of the Austro-Hungarian empire into a catholic family in 1903.
He died in January, 1939 .
O’Callaghan brings us a fictional story with true events ….beginning in
Anschluss, Vienna, in 1938.
It was a game that nobody wanted to miss…. 60,000 tickets were bought ……it was sold out event at Prater Stadium in Leopoldstadt. Crowds were flushing the streets.
The atmosphere around the game created an intense ferocious energy inside and out of the stadium.
Hitler was seated in a box reserved for him.
Nazi Germany force Austrian’s to play for them and lose
Australia’s national team was known as the Wunderteam, but when conscripted ti play Germany, they were less.
“Sindelar will be seen in fullest pomp, which makes this performance so worth savoring. When he runs, even at thirty-five, it is like watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace and musicality, and against it the Germans have no choice but to abandon their strategy of hard tackling and instead fall back, trying, since nothing else is working, to pack the defense with sheer numbers block his route to goal. Still, he glides and slaloms among them, and with scoring seemingly no longer the intent or motivation, every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense”.
Sindelar’s passing and lethal finishing displayed was his trademark, and for three years Austria dominated the world game”.
By the 1930’s Austria had become the best team in the world….earning the sobriquet of Wunderteam.
In the 1980’s, Jack Shine discovered a box of letters—love letters and newspaper clippings that belong to his mother, Rebekah, a young Jewish refugee who came to Cork, Ireland from Vienna, Austria when WWII broke out. She died when Jack was young and Jack never learned of his father’s identity.
Can you imagine finding out that you had a very famous parent you never met? A national treasure in his day… a man who enjoyed fame and riches beyond his contemporaries……a ‘bona fide footballing genius’ ….and whose death (shockingly young) was also the topic of a dark conspiracy theory?
Jack wondered (as I did)….
“Why hadn’t she told him? That is what he struggles with, and what he can’t get over. During the time of war he’d been too young to understand, but by 1949, in those months prior to her death, he was already ten years of age, and old enough to bear the truth, whatever that was”.
Author Billy O’Callagahan (absolutely loved his novel “My Coney Island Baby”), does a phenomenal job bringing us “The Paper Man”…..
It’s a historical fiction story of love against the odds, 20th century Europe, the Holocaust, the cost of fame.
I love when historical novels gets me interested in wanting to know more. And that’s exactly what O’Callaghan did for me.
I was especially moved to learn that at the heart of hearts…..Sindelar — the center-forward of the Wunderteam - (an icon for a masterpiece goal which no one else could have done), was fundamentally opposed to the *Anschluss* [the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. Hitler had forced the resignation of the Austrian chancellor by demanding that he admit Nazis into his cabinet] — but thanks to Sindelar — it remains one of the strangest and most poignant games of football ever played.
So many oddities were associated with a match that took place on April 3, 1938. (Austria was not suppose to win).
There were disagreements about Sindelar’s behavior that day. He missed a number of easy chances in the first half— so much so that many people believe he was deliberately mocking the Nazi Germans. And then — maybe — [diplomacy be damned] not being able to resist the urge any longer — Sindelar did the unthinkable!
When the game ended in victory— Sindelar did a happy dance in front of a VIP box where various Nazi officials were sitting.
Later — instead of surrendering to the pressure to join the new German-Austrian team, Sindelar retired. He bought a cafe from a Jew who as an owner had been forced to give up his business…. choosing to pay the full price rather than a cut-rate, as a non-Jew, Sindelar would’ve been entitled to. His clear distaste for the national government was noted by the Gestapo.
I became soooooo interested in this story.
There are still people who wonder if Sindelar’s death was accidental or death by Gestapo? Personally…..I doubt very much it was an accident.
This is the type of book ….(intimate, powerful, interwoven threads filled marvelous characters and writing), that gets me interested in unsung hero’s, and history. I lost hours of sleep — but it was worth it.
Even reading the acknowledgments made my eyes teary.
March 8, 2023
A cardboard shoe box “bearded in dust and probably decades hidden, tucked away on top of a wardrobe” just screaming that there are old letters inside, love letters, no doubt. Perhaps holding the missing parts of Jack’s life , the story his mother who never told her nine year old when she died.
This novel is multi- layered, about war, about the Holocaust, the desire to know who one’s father is, what secrets a mother’s past holds. It’s about love in the deepest sense, and yes, it’s about what soccer has meant to European countries for decades. It’s an imagined story blended with the real life events in the life a famous soccer player. In alternating chapters, between Kraumberg and Vienna in the 1930’s and Cork in 1980, it’s not just Matthias Sindelar’s story, but of two imagined characters in his life who touched me. A beautifully, sad love story, as beautiful and sad in its own way as O’Callaghan’s My Coney Island Baby, quiet, moving and full of O’Callaghan’s always stunning prose. I loved everything about this book, especially the ending. I love a story that makes me cry for sadness and joy at the same time.
I received a copy of this from David R. Godine Publisher through Edelweiss .
This novel is multi- layered, about war, about the Holocaust, the desire to know who one’s father is, what secrets a mother’s past holds. It’s about love in the deepest sense, and yes, it’s about what soccer has meant to European countries for decades. It’s an imagined story blended with the real life events in the life a famous soccer player. In alternating chapters, between Kraumberg and Vienna in the 1930’s and Cork in 1980, it’s not just Matthias Sindelar’s story, but of two imagined characters in his life who touched me. A beautifully, sad love story, as beautiful and sad in its own way as O’Callaghan’s My Coney Island Baby, quiet, moving and full of O’Callaghan’s always stunning prose. I loved everything about this book, especially the ending. I love a story that makes me cry for sadness and joy at the same time.
I received a copy of this from David R. Godine Publisher through Edelweiss .
June 17, 2023
“The atmosphere even outside the stadium was vicious with expectancy.”
Only Billy O'Callaghan's writing would persuade me to pick up and persist with a novel that opens with 30 pages about a football match. A historically significant match, with the tension, passion, and political foreboding vividly conjured, but nevertheless, it’s football.
“The sun will shine with lying brightness, as if everything is alright.”
Fortunately, it's not really about football or footballers. Nor is it about WW2 and the Holocaust, which propel the story from the shadows. It's about identity, distilled through love; about loss, finding, and recasting identity.
Melding fact and fiction
Many of O’Callaghan’s works arise from real people and real events, but thus far, they’ve been tales passed down his family, about his family. This is a bigger leap: the eponymous Paper Man was the real nickname of Matthias Sindelar, the star of the 1930s Austrian football team; a lapsed Catholic who despised and publicly ridiculed the Nazis, and died in mysterious circumstances. To that, O’Callaghan imagines the story of his young Jewish girlfriend, sent to safety in Cork.
Image: The balletic Mozart of football (Source)
Many years later, her son discovers a small trove of letters, photos, and newspaper cuttings, in German.
“The sadness and dread at having uncovered something quite possibly easier left hidden.”
Is it wise to find out what they will reveal?
“These letters are a bit like photographs. They catch moments, but the view is always limited.”
The telling
The blurb and early pages make the main story arc obvious, and yet the slow reveal, with hints that aren’t quite foreshadowing, keep it interesting. O’Callaghan shows, rather than tells, particularly when describing the subtle, slightly embarrassed, ways some of the male characters note someone’s feelings and subtly meet or mitigate them.
The narrative switches work well: it’s set in two countries (Austria and Ireland) and two time periods (mid to late 1930s and 1980). Some of the main characters appear in both places.
“Sindelar is gaining flesh and bone, becoming less of a story and more, finally, of a person.”
It’s the details, the writing, and the relationships (especially the non-romantic ones), that make it special.
Image: Cork docks, 1990, by Siobhan Russell (Source)
Birthright - and wrong
“I was just months from being born here… My whole story would have been different.”
Jack realises that although growing up among the working poor in Cork could be hard, it was far better than being born a Jew in Nazi Vienna. At one level, that’s obvious, but at a personal level, it’s profound.
“Knowing changes everything.”
I was just months from being born in South Africa. I never gave it much thought until I went to university: SA was still under Apartheid, Mandela was still in prison, and many students were actively campaigning to boycott everything connected with the country. Although as a middle-class white, I’d have had an unjustly privileged life there, it made me begin to think about my position in the world, the advantages I had, and the role of chance and fate.
Image: A bundle of old letters (Source)
Quotes
It’s always hard to limit myself to a sensible number when I review O’Callaghan:
• “Net curtains diffusing the light, sieving it of its sharpness and turning it frail ahead of dusk.”
• “She has been out here since first light, bearing witness to the reluctance of a breaking dawn.”
• “The morning is full of skinning cold.”
• “Long, slightly chaotic hazel-blonde hair and eyes the teasing greenish-gold of harvest afternoons.”
• “Raised in a relentlessly loving home.”
• “Even without a direct blood connection in the world, it was made abundantly clear to him from the beginning that he still had family, and was still - and always would be - adored.”
• “A grin that widens impishly at the least encouragement, coupling the last sweet vestiges of innocence with a king of treacherously scheming street wisdom.” [a 15-year old girl]
• “The gifts quickly came to feel ritualistic, a kind of making up for all that went unspoken.”
• “A marriage without hidden places is a fine notion but doesn’t take into account that, when all is said and done, everyone is still an island unto themselves.”
• “It was still possible to trust someone with everything and still hold on to doubt.”
• “Tides washed in to scrub and salt their surfaces clean of grudging thoughts.”
• “Places full of vicious smiles and with a constant silhouette of menace draping the periphery.” [Viennese cafés!]
More O’Callaghan
Billy O’Callaghan is one of my favourite writers. I came to him via his short stories, which I still prefer: the compressed form fits his poetic writing. But I’ve loved everything he’s written - even when it’s (partly) about football. My review of all his works are HERE, and all thus far, are listed below, in order of publication:
• In Exile: Short Stories, 2008
• In Too Deep and Other Short Stories, 2009
• The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind (stories), 2013
• The Dead House (novella, later in The Boatman), 2017
• A Death in the Family (short story, later in The Boatman), 2017
• My Coney Island Baby (novel, based on a story in The Things We Lose), 2019
• The Boatman and Other Stories, 2020
• Life Sentences (novel), 2021
• The Paper Man (novel), 2023
Only Billy O'Callaghan's writing would persuade me to pick up and persist with a novel that opens with 30 pages about a football match. A historically significant match, with the tension, passion, and political foreboding vividly conjured, but nevertheless, it’s football.
“The sun will shine with lying brightness, as if everything is alright.”
Fortunately, it's not really about football or footballers. Nor is it about WW2 and the Holocaust, which propel the story from the shadows. It's about identity, distilled through love; about loss, finding, and recasting identity.
Melding fact and fiction
Many of O’Callaghan’s works arise from real people and real events, but thus far, they’ve been tales passed down his family, about his family. This is a bigger leap: the eponymous Paper Man was the real nickname of Matthias Sindelar, the star of the 1930s Austrian football team; a lapsed Catholic who despised and publicly ridiculed the Nazis, and died in mysterious circumstances. To that, O’Callaghan imagines the story of his young Jewish girlfriend, sent to safety in Cork.
Image: The balletic Mozart of football (Source)
Many years later, her son discovers a small trove of letters, photos, and newspaper cuttings, in German.
“The sadness and dread at having uncovered something quite possibly easier left hidden.”
Is it wise to find out what they will reveal?
“These letters are a bit like photographs. They catch moments, but the view is always limited.”
The telling
The blurb and early pages make the main story arc obvious, and yet the slow reveal, with hints that aren’t quite foreshadowing, keep it interesting. O’Callaghan shows, rather than tells, particularly when describing the subtle, slightly embarrassed, ways some of the male characters note someone’s feelings and subtly meet or mitigate them.
The narrative switches work well: it’s set in two countries (Austria and Ireland) and two time periods (mid to late 1930s and 1980). Some of the main characters appear in both places.
“Sindelar is gaining flesh and bone, becoming less of a story and more, finally, of a person.”
It’s the details, the writing, and the relationships (especially the non-romantic ones), that make it special.
Image: Cork docks, 1990, by Siobhan Russell (Source)
Birthright - and wrong
“I was just months from being born here… My whole story would have been different.”
Jack realises that although growing up among the working poor in Cork could be hard, it was far better than being born a Jew in Nazi Vienna. At one level, that’s obvious, but at a personal level, it’s profound.
“Knowing changes everything.”
I was just months from being born in South Africa. I never gave it much thought until I went to university: SA was still under Apartheid, Mandela was still in prison, and many students were actively campaigning to boycott everything connected with the country. Although as a middle-class white, I’d have had an unjustly privileged life there, it made me begin to think about my position in the world, the advantages I had, and the role of chance and fate.
Image: A bundle of old letters (Source)
Quotes
It’s always hard to limit myself to a sensible number when I review O’Callaghan:
• “Net curtains diffusing the light, sieving it of its sharpness and turning it frail ahead of dusk.”
• “She has been out here since first light, bearing witness to the reluctance of a breaking dawn.”
• “The morning is full of skinning cold.”
• “Long, slightly chaotic hazel-blonde hair and eyes the teasing greenish-gold of harvest afternoons.”
• “Raised in a relentlessly loving home.”
• “Even without a direct blood connection in the world, it was made abundantly clear to him from the beginning that he still had family, and was still - and always would be - adored.”
• “A grin that widens impishly at the least encouragement, coupling the last sweet vestiges of innocence with a king of treacherously scheming street wisdom.” [a 15-year old girl]
• “The gifts quickly came to feel ritualistic, a kind of making up for all that went unspoken.”
• “A marriage without hidden places is a fine notion but doesn’t take into account that, when all is said and done, everyone is still an island unto themselves.”
• “It was still possible to trust someone with everything and still hold on to doubt.”
• “Tides washed in to scrub and salt their surfaces clean of grudging thoughts.”
• “Places full of vicious smiles and with a constant silhouette of menace draping the periphery.” [Viennese cafés!]
More O’Callaghan
Billy O’Callaghan is one of my favourite writers. I came to him via his short stories, which I still prefer: the compressed form fits his poetic writing. But I’ve loved everything he’s written - even when it’s (partly) about football. My review of all his works are HERE, and all thus far, are listed below, in order of publication:
• In Exile: Short Stories, 2008
• In Too Deep and Other Short Stories, 2009
• The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind (stories), 2013
• The Dead House (novella, later in The Boatman), 2017
• A Death in the Family (short story, later in The Boatman), 2017
• My Coney Island Baby (novel, based on a story in The Things We Lose), 2019
• The Boatman and Other Stories, 2020
• Life Sentences (novel), 2021
• The Paper Man (novel), 2023
May 2, 2023
Billy O’Callaghan’s The Paper Man slowly unveils a love story affected by pivotal world events. It weaves a compelling story in two time frames brought together from one man’s search for identity that spans two countries and leaves an impact on multiple generations. The story enthralls on many levels. It’s a deeply human one that takes its inspiration from the life of a celebrated historical figure who suffered the ramifications of the Holocaust.
It is 1980s Cork, Ireland, and 41-year-old Jack Shine’s life is now changed. In the dark, just before sleep, he whispers to his wife as much as to himself, “You think you know yourself. You fill yourself up with what you can, you grab what’s going and hold on. And then something like this happens, and suddenly you’re empty all over again.”
The emptiness Jack refers to concerns the death of his mother when he was age ten. What he knows of himself is that he is well-loved by the relatives who raised him, and that his mother, Rebekah, “had arrived here from Vienna, as vibrant and cosmopolitan a city as any in Europe . . . she’d originally been country born and bred and had kept her preference for silences and slower ways.” Jack understands that his young, Jewish mother had fled Vienna on the cusp of WWII to be out of harm’s way and found safe haven in Cork, with the family of her father’s brother. But because of his age when she died, Jack knows little of Rebekah’s backstory, including the identity of his father. His relatives are equally unaware of the details that led to Jack’s birth, having asked no questions when Rebekah arrived in Cork pregnant and unable to speak the language.
Local stevedore Jack lives down the street with his wife and daughter from the house in which he was raised. Now that his original family home is on the market, he clears out its contents and finds “a twine-bound grey cardboard shoebox . . . bearded in dust and probably decades hidden,” in which a series of faded newspaper clippings, love letters, and photographs are neatly preserved. The letters are written in German and addressed to his mother. “The one-sided nature of the letters, especially when considered in total, only raises further questions and deepens the sense of mystery.” What Jack recalls of his mother is that “she is timid, silent to a fault, and easily cowed, the kind to hold herself to smallness in any room.” Although he fears what the shoebox might reveal, something within him must know. Because his nearby father-in-law speaks fluent German, Jack dares to solicit his involvement. And so begins Jack’s search for identity—his father’s, and by extension, his own.
It is the dawn of WWII in 1938 Vienna, and the whole of the region puts their sense of pending doom aside in favor of the last-gasping breath of patriotism, as the Austrian and German soccer teams face off, on the last day the Austrian flag flies in front of 60,000 exuberant fans. The symbolic significance of the match cannot be overstated, when onto the playing field strolls Matthias Sindelar, the Austrian team player everyone has come to see.
Matthias Sindelar is larger than life. Regaled as the finest living soccer player, his moniker, the Paper Man, is aptly given. “When he runs, even at thirty-five, it is like watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace, and musicality . . . he glides and slaloms among them . . . every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense.” An object of Austrian pride, “The press loved him because in everything he did he was pure story. Mozart with a football.”
With all eyes upon him at the last match before the war, Sindelar is unable to resist the opportunity to publicly snub his opponents, and consequently draws the long gaze of the Gestapo when he performs a mocking gesture before a riveted crowd that feels like “a colosseum moment.”
Sindelar, reputably a ladies’ man, has his heart captured by young and innocent Rebekah from the village of Kaumberg. “The mismatch was instantly apparent: at the time of their initial encounter she had only just turned nineteen and was every bit the country innocent . . . The thirteen-year age difference felt like a hurdle impossible to overcome.” As their relationship evolves into something profound, so does tension over Germany’s occupation of Austria, setting the stage for the pair to become star-crossed lovers.
O’Callaghan’s sense of place in The Paper Man’s two time frames is cinematic. The historical accuracy of streets, buildings, and cafés in 1938 Vienna is vivid, and the humble neighborhoods of working-class, 1980s Cork are alive all the way to the waterfront docks.
The author’s knowledge of soccer’s breakneck speed dynamic is displayed with breathtaking minutiae, striking a fine balance between those cheering from the stands and those playing on the field. O’Callaghan’s use of language is the life force of the story. His long sentences are sonorous and poetic; no detail is left unattended in his masterfully fluid prose.
The Paper Man is a haunting story gorgeously crafted with subtle themes of identity, nationalism, dislocation, lost love, and the price of fame. The story informs and intrigues the most discerning reader of literary and historical fiction, and will linger long after its final page.
It is 1980s Cork, Ireland, and 41-year-old Jack Shine’s life is now changed. In the dark, just before sleep, he whispers to his wife as much as to himself, “You think you know yourself. You fill yourself up with what you can, you grab what’s going and hold on. And then something like this happens, and suddenly you’re empty all over again.”
The emptiness Jack refers to concerns the death of his mother when he was age ten. What he knows of himself is that he is well-loved by the relatives who raised him, and that his mother, Rebekah, “had arrived here from Vienna, as vibrant and cosmopolitan a city as any in Europe . . . she’d originally been country born and bred and had kept her preference for silences and slower ways.” Jack understands that his young, Jewish mother had fled Vienna on the cusp of WWII to be out of harm’s way and found safe haven in Cork, with the family of her father’s brother. But because of his age when she died, Jack knows little of Rebekah’s backstory, including the identity of his father. His relatives are equally unaware of the details that led to Jack’s birth, having asked no questions when Rebekah arrived in Cork pregnant and unable to speak the language.
Local stevedore Jack lives down the street with his wife and daughter from the house in which he was raised. Now that his original family home is on the market, he clears out its contents and finds “a twine-bound grey cardboard shoebox . . . bearded in dust and probably decades hidden,” in which a series of faded newspaper clippings, love letters, and photographs are neatly preserved. The letters are written in German and addressed to his mother. “The one-sided nature of the letters, especially when considered in total, only raises further questions and deepens the sense of mystery.” What Jack recalls of his mother is that “she is timid, silent to a fault, and easily cowed, the kind to hold herself to smallness in any room.” Although he fears what the shoebox might reveal, something within him must know. Because his nearby father-in-law speaks fluent German, Jack dares to solicit his involvement. And so begins Jack’s search for identity—his father’s, and by extension, his own.
It is the dawn of WWII in 1938 Vienna, and the whole of the region puts their sense of pending doom aside in favor of the last-gasping breath of patriotism, as the Austrian and German soccer teams face off, on the last day the Austrian flag flies in front of 60,000 exuberant fans. The symbolic significance of the match cannot be overstated, when onto the playing field strolls Matthias Sindelar, the Austrian team player everyone has come to see.
Matthias Sindelar is larger than life. Regaled as the finest living soccer player, his moniker, the Paper Man, is aptly given. “When he runs, even at thirty-five, it is like watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace, and musicality . . . he glides and slaloms among them . . . every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense.” An object of Austrian pride, “The press loved him because in everything he did he was pure story. Mozart with a football.”
With all eyes upon him at the last match before the war, Sindelar is unable to resist the opportunity to publicly snub his opponents, and consequently draws the long gaze of the Gestapo when he performs a mocking gesture before a riveted crowd that feels like “a colosseum moment.”
Sindelar, reputably a ladies’ man, has his heart captured by young and innocent Rebekah from the village of Kaumberg. “The mismatch was instantly apparent: at the time of their initial encounter she had only just turned nineteen and was every bit the country innocent . . . The thirteen-year age difference felt like a hurdle impossible to overcome.” As their relationship evolves into something profound, so does tension over Germany’s occupation of Austria, setting the stage for the pair to become star-crossed lovers.
O’Callaghan’s sense of place in The Paper Man’s two time frames is cinematic. The historical accuracy of streets, buildings, and cafés in 1938 Vienna is vivid, and the humble neighborhoods of working-class, 1980s Cork are alive all the way to the waterfront docks.
The author’s knowledge of soccer’s breakneck speed dynamic is displayed with breathtaking minutiae, striking a fine balance between those cheering from the stands and those playing on the field. O’Callaghan’s use of language is the life force of the story. His long sentences are sonorous and poetic; no detail is left unattended in his masterfully fluid prose.
The Paper Man is a haunting story gorgeously crafted with subtle themes of identity, nationalism, dislocation, lost love, and the price of fame. The story informs and intrigues the most discerning reader of literary and historical fiction, and will linger long after its final page.
May 1, 2023
When historical fiction is as well researched, and as powerfully written as "The Paper Man", you can't but enjoy the read. And in the hands of Billy O'Callaghan, you must know up front that you just might shed a tear or two...
This is a dual time-line novel based on true events. The 1930s time-line explores the short and illustrious life of renowned Austrian soccer player Matthias Sindelar (aka The Paper Man), including his one great love, Rebekah. Sindelar was voted the best Austrian footballer of the 20th Century in 1999, and was named Austria's sportsman of the century a year before.
Sindelar's beloved Rebekah, whom he never married, was Jewish. When Sindelar realized just how dire the circumstances were getting for Jews in 1938 he used his influence and connections to get her out of the country, and arranged for her to stay with cousins in Cork, Ireland.
In the 1980s time-line we meet up with Jack Shine who lives in Cork, Ireland and works as a stevedore on Cork's docks. When Jack is clearing out the house he lived in with his mother growing up, he discovers an old shoe box filled with love letters, photographs, and newspaper clippings. His mother never told him about his father and she died of tuberculosis when Jack was only eleven years old. Now, as he delves into the letters and clippings, he becomes aware that his father is very likely the infamous footballer (ie soccer player), Matthias Siindelar.
This newfound knowledge turns Jack's world on its axis. At the urging of his wife and in the company of his father-in-law, he makes the pilgrimage back to Vienna to learn more about the man Sindelar. He meets Sindelar's best friend and visits many of the places the men frequented. Also, he visited his father's grave...
I was totally immersed in "The Paper Man" and was moved by the writing and vividly drawn characters. If you are a fan of historical fiction, then I highly recommend you add this title to your TBR list.
4.5 stars rounded up
This is a dual time-line novel based on true events. The 1930s time-line explores the short and illustrious life of renowned Austrian soccer player Matthias Sindelar (aka The Paper Man), including his one great love, Rebekah. Sindelar was voted the best Austrian footballer of the 20th Century in 1999, and was named Austria's sportsman of the century a year before.
Sindelar's beloved Rebekah, whom he never married, was Jewish. When Sindelar realized just how dire the circumstances were getting for Jews in 1938 he used his influence and connections to get her out of the country, and arranged for her to stay with cousins in Cork, Ireland.
In the 1980s time-line we meet up with Jack Shine who lives in Cork, Ireland and works as a stevedore on Cork's docks. When Jack is clearing out the house he lived in with his mother growing up, he discovers an old shoe box filled with love letters, photographs, and newspaper clippings. His mother never told him about his father and she died of tuberculosis when Jack was only eleven years old. Now, as he delves into the letters and clippings, he becomes aware that his father is very likely the infamous footballer (ie soccer player), Matthias Siindelar.
This newfound knowledge turns Jack's world on its axis. At the urging of his wife and in the company of his father-in-law, he makes the pilgrimage back to Vienna to learn more about the man Sindelar. He meets Sindelar's best friend and visits many of the places the men frequented. Also, he visited his father's grave...
I was totally immersed in "The Paper Man" and was moved by the writing and vividly drawn characters. If you are a fan of historical fiction, then I highly recommend you add this title to your TBR list.
4.5 stars rounded up
January 9, 2024
One of my favourite authors to start the year. Another great read set between Vienna at the onset of war and Cork. Beautiful writing
July 14, 2023
It’s a wonderful thing to discover a new writer, an author of whom one has never previously heard and would almost certainly have never read but for a circumstance that is almost accidental. When one finishes such a book and thinks the word most properly to describe it is “beautiful,” and that, in its emotional impact on the reader, it ranks with some of the greatest classics he has read, the feeling is akin to having experienced a miracle.
That is the experience I have just had with Billy O’ Callahan’s novel, “The Paper Man.”
The plot is intriguing and masterfully rendered. Jack Shine is a happily-married Irish longshoreman, now in his forties. He was born out of wedlock in 1938 to a Jewish refugee from Nazi Vienna, who found sanctuary with previously unknown relatives in Cork, Ireland, and discovered she was pregnant after her arrival. The boy’s beloved mother died of tuberculosis when he was only eleven, perhaps explaining why he was never told anything about his father or his mother’s pre-Ireland life.
Cleaning out the attic of his boyhood home prior to its sale – he grew up as a much-loved child of his Irish family – he discovers a pack of carefully preserved letters written to his mother in German during the period immediately after her arrival in Cork. It appears they are love letters. And strangely, they are accompanied by a number of yellowing news clipping about soccer.
With the help of his father-in-law, who emigrated from Eastern Europe before the Nazi period and speaks German, the letters and news clippings are translated. The clippings are about, and the letters from, a man named Sindelar. The tale about Jack and his mother's love affair with Sindelar are fiction, but Sindelar was an actual person, one of the greatest soccer players of his day.
Sindelar died in his apartment, reportedly of carbon monoxide poisoning, in January 1939. Many believed at the time, and some still believe, that Sindelar, an anti-Nazi, was murdered by the German occupiers. Legend has it that during a famous soccer match between the German national team and players from what the Nazis called “Ostmark” (a regional name used by the Nazis to refer to the former Austria) shortly after the Anschluss, Sindelar imprudently mocked Nazi bigwigs with an over-the-top victory celebration right in front of the box in which they were sitting. The story of Sindelar and his death is easily available online, including a long 1997 article in the “Guardian” (U.K.), which concludes that although blaming the Nazis is emotionally appealing, Sindelar’s death was almost certainly caused by a defective chimney.
Anyway, back to the novel. O’ Callahan deftly shifts between 1938 Vienna and contemporary Ireland to relate the story of the love between Jack’s mother and Sindelar amid the encroaching Nazi tyranny, and the drama of Jack’s accidental discovery of the man who appears to have been his father. The love between Sindelar and the young girl Rebekah is depicted beautifully and their parting – caused by Sindelar’s perspicacity in understanding that his Jewish lover must get out of Austria while she can – is wrenching. And if the reader’s normal bedtime is approaching and he nonetheless begins the final chapters of the book, he should expect to lose some sleep. He will not easily interrupt the story of the trip taken by Jack and his father-in-law to Vienna to try to confirm Sindelar’s paternity and learn more about him. It is engrossing and satisfying reading, filled with history, tension and psychological acuity.
I don’t think one needs to be a soccer fan or have any connection to Vienna to find “The Paper Man” a page-turner. In the interests of full disclosure, though, I should reveal that this reviewer is a member of both categories.
I learned of “The Paper Man” from the New York Times Book Review, a publication I regularly look at but don’t generally read. About two weeks ago, I noticed a column about historical novels, a type of fiction I enjoy, particularly when set during World War II and the Nazi era. Glancing at the column, which summarized three novels, my attention was immediately arrested by the word “Vienna.” Now reading with interest, I was quite amazed to see that a major character was Sindelar, a person with whose name and history I was already very familiar.
My parents were refugees from Nazi Vienna. And I well remember my dad telling me of Sindelar’s amazing exploits on the soccer pitch, some of which he personally witnessed as a boy. The time elapsed between my reading of the review and calling up Amazon on my computer was short.
That is the experience I have just had with Billy O’ Callahan’s novel, “The Paper Man.”
The plot is intriguing and masterfully rendered. Jack Shine is a happily-married Irish longshoreman, now in his forties. He was born out of wedlock in 1938 to a Jewish refugee from Nazi Vienna, who found sanctuary with previously unknown relatives in Cork, Ireland, and discovered she was pregnant after her arrival. The boy’s beloved mother died of tuberculosis when he was only eleven, perhaps explaining why he was never told anything about his father or his mother’s pre-Ireland life.
Cleaning out the attic of his boyhood home prior to its sale – he grew up as a much-loved child of his Irish family – he discovers a pack of carefully preserved letters written to his mother in German during the period immediately after her arrival in Cork. It appears they are love letters. And strangely, they are accompanied by a number of yellowing news clipping about soccer.
With the help of his father-in-law, who emigrated from Eastern Europe before the Nazi period and speaks German, the letters and news clippings are translated. The clippings are about, and the letters from, a man named Sindelar. The tale about Jack and his mother's love affair with Sindelar are fiction, but Sindelar was an actual person, one of the greatest soccer players of his day.
Sindelar died in his apartment, reportedly of carbon monoxide poisoning, in January 1939. Many believed at the time, and some still believe, that Sindelar, an anti-Nazi, was murdered by the German occupiers. Legend has it that during a famous soccer match between the German national team and players from what the Nazis called “Ostmark” (a regional name used by the Nazis to refer to the former Austria) shortly after the Anschluss, Sindelar imprudently mocked Nazi bigwigs with an over-the-top victory celebration right in front of the box in which they were sitting. The story of Sindelar and his death is easily available online, including a long 1997 article in the “Guardian” (U.K.), which concludes that although blaming the Nazis is emotionally appealing, Sindelar’s death was almost certainly caused by a defective chimney.
Anyway, back to the novel. O’ Callahan deftly shifts between 1938 Vienna and contemporary Ireland to relate the story of the love between Jack’s mother and Sindelar amid the encroaching Nazi tyranny, and the drama of Jack’s accidental discovery of the man who appears to have been his father. The love between Sindelar and the young girl Rebekah is depicted beautifully and their parting – caused by Sindelar’s perspicacity in understanding that his Jewish lover must get out of Austria while she can – is wrenching. And if the reader’s normal bedtime is approaching and he nonetheless begins the final chapters of the book, he should expect to lose some sleep. He will not easily interrupt the story of the trip taken by Jack and his father-in-law to Vienna to try to confirm Sindelar’s paternity and learn more about him. It is engrossing and satisfying reading, filled with history, tension and psychological acuity.
I don’t think one needs to be a soccer fan or have any connection to Vienna to find “The Paper Man” a page-turner. In the interests of full disclosure, though, I should reveal that this reviewer is a member of both categories.
I learned of “The Paper Man” from the New York Times Book Review, a publication I regularly look at but don’t generally read. About two weeks ago, I noticed a column about historical novels, a type of fiction I enjoy, particularly when set during World War II and the Nazi era. Glancing at the column, which summarized three novels, my attention was immediately arrested by the word “Vienna.” Now reading with interest, I was quite amazed to see that a major character was Sindelar, a person with whose name and history I was already very familiar.
My parents were refugees from Nazi Vienna. And I well remember my dad telling me of Sindelar’s amazing exploits on the soccer pitch, some of which he personally witnessed as a boy. The time elapsed between my reading of the review and calling up Amazon on my computer was short.
July 21, 2023
Loved this, loved the story, loved the writing. I had looked forward to this release and it didn't disappoint. Based on the story of Austrian soccer legend Matthias Sindelar set just before the war started and continued in Ireland where his son discovers who is father really is and sets out to find out his story.
July 26, 2024
Beautifully written. A gorgeous book
July 15, 2023
Superb. Simply, superb. What a beautifully written book
May 30, 2023
i loved this book - it was an unexpected treasure. I had never heard of Sindelar, but do find soccer interesting as a sport, and do appreciated its national importance. I had heard of Jew Town but did not realise that it dated back to the arrival of Lithuanian jews. I have lived in Cork City for years and find its history very interesting. I am aware of the devastation of TB in Cork in the last century. I found the story of Rebekah's life inspiring and tragic. I hope to read mor Billy's books as this book tells a very interesting story of an interesting time in Cork City and Austria.
June 5, 2023
This book has shades of 'Zatopek - Today we die a little' - in that its hero is a supreme athlete whose fame was exploited by the despotic regime in power at the time. The Nazis in Sindelar's case and the Russians at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in Zatopek's. Both appear to have similarly resisted this exploitation.
I'd never heard of Sindelar before reading this book and it prompted me to search for the background and while the details of his death are readily found, there's nothing about the relationship with Rebekah so I assume this has been entirely invented. I could be wrong here as the obits concentrate on the bare facts. I'm not sure I'd be too happy about the invention of a relationship if it were me!
I thought the sections set in Vienna were more successful with those set in 1980s Cork. Overall I found the storyline a little weak and neither sweeping nor unforgettable but it passed the time and had its moments when describing the man himself.
I'd never heard of Sindelar before reading this book and it prompted me to search for the background and while the details of his death are readily found, there's nothing about the relationship with Rebekah so I assume this has been entirely invented. I could be wrong here as the obits concentrate on the bare facts. I'm not sure I'd be too happy about the invention of a relationship if it were me!
I thought the sections set in Vienna were more successful with those set in 1980s Cork. Overall I found the storyline a little weak and neither sweeping nor unforgettable but it passed the time and had its moments when describing the man himself.
July 1, 2023
How the past stays with us (Vienna, Austria mid-to-late 1930s; Cork, Ireland 1980): “Art is flashes,” writes Billy O’ Callaghan, imagining what sports commentators might have said watching “maybe one of the greatest there’s ever been.” When “people came to see magic, and to have their breath taken away” by an Austrian superstar football player (America’s soccer). It’s impossible to separate O’Callaghan’s prose that takes our breath away from the legendary man who flew through the air “light as a breeze” – “The Paper Man.”
So why, O’Callaghan implies, don’t we know Matthias Sindelar (affectionately, Mutzl) the way we know of Brazil’s soccer legend Pelé? And, how come Ireland’s O’Callaghan isn’t as well-known to us as he should be, crafting such sadly beautiful prose? In 2022, I concluded his Life Sentences was an “awesome piece of literary craft.” The Paper Man is that too; this time expanding beyond Irish generational memories to Austria’s WWII history and a fictionalized love affair for the ages. Opening a month after the Nazis annexed Austria on a specific date April 3, 1938 – the Anschluss, which stood for Hitler’s grandiose unification plans. It was also the last time The Paper Man and his Austria Vienna team played for their country.
In O’Callaghan’s 2019 novel, My Coney Island Baby, he writes of dreamers and those “born to practicality.” In this dual timeframe story, 1930s Vienna is both the stuff of dreamers and then, catastrophically, collapses into the sheer practicality of survival.
First we’re treated to a man “so much more alive than anyone else,” who let others dream in those “genius at work” moments, ignoring the Fascist forces engulfing them. Early 30’s Vienna is likened to Paris in the 1920s when dreamers, intellectuals, and artists pulsated in a café society before Hitler destroyed dreams and lives. Dreaming and survival linked in the poignant Vienna storyline when thirty-something Sindelar falls soulfully in love with nineteen-year-old Rebekah, Jewish, a “girlishly pretty” café waitress. Yes, true love can happen “at first sight,” the name of the chapter. Until the Holocaust grotesquely twisted that love into survival mode.
The 1980 chapters are set in Cork, where O’Callaghan grew up and lives. A place “born of practicality,” especially seen through the fictional protagonist Jack Shine – Rebekah’s son. Compelled to separate from the love of her life, O’Callaghan lets us imagine how much more of a blow it must have been when his mother discovers she was pregnant. Had it not been for Sindelar’s connections, a fearful, circuitous route out of Austria, she probably would not have made it. Not to her parents’ village in Kaumberg but someplace safer, to her Uncle Joe and his wife Ruth’s Cork home. They accepted and loved her like their own, into their home in a small Jewish neighborhood of historical significance.
Jewtown originated in the late 1800s when Lithuanian Jews fled here escaping Russian persecution. O’Callaghan wants us to remember this mostly vanished community of “Hibernian Buildings,” that’s “tucked in behind the city’s docks.” When he says it was a place that “feels like the edge of the world . . . with no place left to run,” he wants us to remember Jews have a long history of persecution.
The Paper Man is a novel about remembering. Rebekah died when Jack was eleven; he’s forty-one in 1980. Though the “shadow of loss never completely fades,” the family that took in his pregnant mother became his parents, their two children his siblings, when Rebekah died some thirty years ago. Nurturing a “particularly precious sense of love and belonging,” the edginess of a gritty place softens. His biological dad may have been a man “who lived enough to fill a dozen lives” but Jack never got to glimpse even one. Had he not stumbled on a box of intimate love letters sent to his mother from a mystery man, he still wouldn’t. No one asked, no one knows. The discovery ignites an “intangible intensity” of needing to know. To remember. Turning The Paper Man into an immersive historical and fictionalized, unresolved mystery.
At thirty-five, Sindelar’s “firework” of a life was snuffed out, suspiciously and “terribly difficult to accept,” when he was found dead in his apartment. The cause of death declared carbon monoxide poisoning seeping into faulty ventilation. Some speculated if the cause was suicide, but that doesn’t seem to fit the man courageous enough to speak out against Hitler. Feeling on top of the world and Catholic, Sindelar played on a national team with Jewish players the Nazis contemptuously called Judenklub. Having never read a WWII story involving sports, Jew Club is a new word in the canon of anti-Semitism.
Since the letters were written in Old German, his father-in-law translated them for him, revealed a little at a time. He’s dear to Jack, where we see the same understanding, love, and support of his wife. (He’s blessed with a little girl too.) The letters stir both men deeply as it becomes clear Rebekah was once happy, not the suffering person remembered most dying from a disease associated with poverty. A few photographs were also found of the man who gave his team the glorious name Wunderteam.
Sindelar’s 1938 soccer performance was “an exercise in grand humiliation.” Could the Nazis have murdered him? Assumptions aren’t good enough for Jack, whose contented life has now come apart. And so the novel also becomes a tenacious, searching tale.
Sindelar possessed an “elegance of pose” likened to “watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace, and musicality.” Captured by a writer of elegant, powerful prose that has a musical and poetic rhythm, crafting words that echo his forgotten hero: “Every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense.” Words that are an exhibition on literary prose.
Prose that swells like the rising tides of the author’s homeland in close proximity to the sea and the dockyards – a “swelling boom.” O’Callaghan’s long, sweeping sentences, some a full-page paragraph, come in swells, creating an intensity matching the depth of emotions unearthed.
For all the complexities of delving into truths that are hard to put together when you’re “dealing with fragments,” and survivors who may not be alive anymore or their memories foggy and full of anxieties, the chapters hit on simple titles that capture their essence and trajectory. “Anschluss,” “Jewtown,” “At First Sight,” and “The Letters” are followed by “Falling,” “The Marina,” “Separating,” “Revelation,” “Arriving,” “Expecting,” “Searching,” “Dying,” and “An Ending” – which never really ends. Cork “a place of long memory,” and O’Callaghan a passionate writer who has pieced together fictionalized history that feels as real and alive as past memories can be.
Cork is where “men and women roll up their sleeves to work and who keep their horizons close and their ambitions small.” By giving Jack the backbreaking work of a “docker” (or longshoreman, stevedore) toiling in drenching rain and frigid, windy conditions, O’Callaghan also wants us to remember those vanishing workers once so vital to Ireland’s shipping industry.
The layered depth of emotions, humanity, and tenderness Jack brings to dark and troubled times is a reminder that “everyone carries their problems with them.” Yet Jack is wise. Our literary hero since he also recognizes that “what he has in his life is more than he ever wants to risk.”
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
So why, O’Callaghan implies, don’t we know Matthias Sindelar (affectionately, Mutzl) the way we know of Brazil’s soccer legend Pelé? And, how come Ireland’s O’Callaghan isn’t as well-known to us as he should be, crafting such sadly beautiful prose? In 2022, I concluded his Life Sentences was an “awesome piece of literary craft.” The Paper Man is that too; this time expanding beyond Irish generational memories to Austria’s WWII history and a fictionalized love affair for the ages. Opening a month after the Nazis annexed Austria on a specific date April 3, 1938 – the Anschluss, which stood for Hitler’s grandiose unification plans. It was also the last time The Paper Man and his Austria Vienna team played for their country.
In O’Callaghan’s 2019 novel, My Coney Island Baby, he writes of dreamers and those “born to practicality.” In this dual timeframe story, 1930s Vienna is both the stuff of dreamers and then, catastrophically, collapses into the sheer practicality of survival.
First we’re treated to a man “so much more alive than anyone else,” who let others dream in those “genius at work” moments, ignoring the Fascist forces engulfing them. Early 30’s Vienna is likened to Paris in the 1920s when dreamers, intellectuals, and artists pulsated in a café society before Hitler destroyed dreams and lives. Dreaming and survival linked in the poignant Vienna storyline when thirty-something Sindelar falls soulfully in love with nineteen-year-old Rebekah, Jewish, a “girlishly pretty” café waitress. Yes, true love can happen “at first sight,” the name of the chapter. Until the Holocaust grotesquely twisted that love into survival mode.
The 1980 chapters are set in Cork, where O’Callaghan grew up and lives. A place “born of practicality,” especially seen through the fictional protagonist Jack Shine – Rebekah’s son. Compelled to separate from the love of her life, O’Callaghan lets us imagine how much more of a blow it must have been when his mother discovers she was pregnant. Had it not been for Sindelar’s connections, a fearful, circuitous route out of Austria, she probably would not have made it. Not to her parents’ village in Kaumberg but someplace safer, to her Uncle Joe and his wife Ruth’s Cork home. They accepted and loved her like their own, into their home in a small Jewish neighborhood of historical significance.
Jewtown originated in the late 1800s when Lithuanian Jews fled here escaping Russian persecution. O’Callaghan wants us to remember this mostly vanished community of “Hibernian Buildings,” that’s “tucked in behind the city’s docks.” When he says it was a place that “feels like the edge of the world . . . with no place left to run,” he wants us to remember Jews have a long history of persecution.
The Paper Man is a novel about remembering. Rebekah died when Jack was eleven; he’s forty-one in 1980. Though the “shadow of loss never completely fades,” the family that took in his pregnant mother became his parents, their two children his siblings, when Rebekah died some thirty years ago. Nurturing a “particularly precious sense of love and belonging,” the edginess of a gritty place softens. His biological dad may have been a man “who lived enough to fill a dozen lives” but Jack never got to glimpse even one. Had he not stumbled on a box of intimate love letters sent to his mother from a mystery man, he still wouldn’t. No one asked, no one knows. The discovery ignites an “intangible intensity” of needing to know. To remember. Turning The Paper Man into an immersive historical and fictionalized, unresolved mystery.
At thirty-five, Sindelar’s “firework” of a life was snuffed out, suspiciously and “terribly difficult to accept,” when he was found dead in his apartment. The cause of death declared carbon monoxide poisoning seeping into faulty ventilation. Some speculated if the cause was suicide, but that doesn’t seem to fit the man courageous enough to speak out against Hitler. Feeling on top of the world and Catholic, Sindelar played on a national team with Jewish players the Nazis contemptuously called Judenklub. Having never read a WWII story involving sports, Jew Club is a new word in the canon of anti-Semitism.
Since the letters were written in Old German, his father-in-law translated them for him, revealed a little at a time. He’s dear to Jack, where we see the same understanding, love, and support of his wife. (He’s blessed with a little girl too.) The letters stir both men deeply as it becomes clear Rebekah was once happy, not the suffering person remembered most dying from a disease associated with poverty. A few photographs were also found of the man who gave his team the glorious name Wunderteam.
Sindelar’s 1938 soccer performance was “an exercise in grand humiliation.” Could the Nazis have murdered him? Assumptions aren’t good enough for Jack, whose contented life has now come apart. And so the novel also becomes a tenacious, searching tale.
Sindelar possessed an “elegance of pose” likened to “watching a great dancer, that same godly elegance of power, grace, and musicality.” Captured by a writer of elegant, powerful prose that has a musical and poetic rhythm, crafting words that echo his forgotten hero: “Every touch, pass and dribble becomes a small glory in and of itself, an exhibition in the purest sense.” Words that are an exhibition on literary prose.
Prose that swells like the rising tides of the author’s homeland in close proximity to the sea and the dockyards – a “swelling boom.” O’Callaghan’s long, sweeping sentences, some a full-page paragraph, come in swells, creating an intensity matching the depth of emotions unearthed.
For all the complexities of delving into truths that are hard to put together when you’re “dealing with fragments,” and survivors who may not be alive anymore or their memories foggy and full of anxieties, the chapters hit on simple titles that capture their essence and trajectory. “Anschluss,” “Jewtown,” “At First Sight,” and “The Letters” are followed by “Falling,” “The Marina,” “Separating,” “Revelation,” “Arriving,” “Expecting,” “Searching,” “Dying,” and “An Ending” – which never really ends. Cork “a place of long memory,” and O’Callaghan a passionate writer who has pieced together fictionalized history that feels as real and alive as past memories can be.
Cork is where “men and women roll up their sleeves to work and who keep their horizons close and their ambitions small.” By giving Jack the backbreaking work of a “docker” (or longshoreman, stevedore) toiling in drenching rain and frigid, windy conditions, O’Callaghan also wants us to remember those vanishing workers once so vital to Ireland’s shipping industry.
The layered depth of emotions, humanity, and tenderness Jack brings to dark and troubled times is a reminder that “everyone carries their problems with them.” Yet Jack is wise. Our literary hero since he also recognizes that “what he has in his life is more than he ever wants to risk.”
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
May 16, 2023
I was unsure initially because I did not want to read a book about soccer but Billy O'Callaghan has been one of my favorite discoveries and the soccer is in fact only a small part of a big story. Once I started I could scarcely stop reading. The writing is beautiful as I have come to expect, the characters are so alive and real and the story held me and would not let go. I loved it.
June 26, 2023
The Paper Man by Billy O’ Callaghan published with Jonathan Cape (Penguin) on May 4th and is based on true events. It is described as ‘the story of twentieth-century Europe and love against the odds. It is a story that will take Jack far from Cork and all the way back to Vienna, and towards The Paper Man.'
In July 2022 I wrote in my review of Life Sentences that Billy O’ Callaghan was a master storyteller and, after reading The Paper Man, I can quite honestly say the same thing again. Reading the words of Billy O’ Callaghan always transports the reader into the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Set across two timelines, 1930s Vienna and 1980s Cork, it was as though I was reading a memoir. And in many ways I was, albeit mixed with fiction, as Billy O’ Callaghan gives us a brief insight into the life of world-renowned Austrian footballer Matthias Sindelar.
Sindelar, known as The Paper Man, played in the famous match between Germany and Austria in April, 1938 to mark the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany. Following the match, the Austrian team would be no more, absorbed into the German national football team. For players like Sindelar, it is unclear how they privately felt about this but, from the history books, it can be assumed he wasn’t a fan, displaying his discontent by kicking the ball into the back of the net and dancing at the end of the game. Sindelar was found dead in his apartment in 1939 under a cloud of suspicion. With The Paper Man, Billy O’ Callaghan creates a dramatic and breath-taking sidebar to Sindelar’s story, through his imagined love affair with a young Jewish girl, Rebekah Schein.
1980s Cork and Jack Shine is going through his mother’s belongings. Growing up in Jewtown, which was once home to a successful and vibrant Jewish community in the city, Jack has always felt welcomed and loved. His mother Rebekah had escaped Vienna as a refugee and Cork was where he was born. As Jack sorts through her stuff, he discovers a box containing ‘mementoes and love letters from another time, with newspaper snippets ‘four badly yellowed newspaper clippings, a pair of faded hand-sized photographs, and a sheaf of letters.’ Jack has never known who his father was but, on looking at the photographs, he begins to wonder. Rebekah died of TB when Jack was ten so he never really knew his mother but now, with this box, Jack might finally discover his true beginnings
‘The letters. God. At forty-one, he’d long since accepted his lot, the missing pieces just a fact of life. Growing up, most of the boys he knew had fathers, but there was scarcely a family in Jewtown spared the damage of the war, at least on some level, kin – extended if not immediate – lost to its brutalities, and in the face of such senseless horror, and the sheer immensity of its magnitude, enquiry seemed futile’
As Jack explores what the contents of this box mean, the reader is transported back to pre-war Austria and into the life of a young girl whose world was about to change. With the beautifully expressive pen of Billy O’ Callaghan we imagine life in Vienna and the surrounding towns at that time. As Hitler’s power strengthens, the fear is tangible, as the lives of many are on the brink of unknown devastation and barbaric cruelty.
The passion between this, on paper, unlikely couple is beautifully depicted. With a large age difference and seemingly opposing lifestyles, Matthias and Rebekah’s relationship was unexpected. But the attraction was unstoppable and their lives soon became intertwined, with Rebekah deciding ‘for certain that whatever this was, whether love or something other, it was all there would ever be for her, and all she needed.’
Up to this point Jack had been relatively settled, working as a stevedore on the Cork docks but now, ‘all of a sudden, peace is lost, and the cacophony of questions has him muddled.’
Billy O’ Callaghan is an exquisite writer. His ability to convey a place and time is cinematic in its descriptions, transporting the reader to wherever a scene is set. Walking the streets of 1930s Vienna in all its opulence or joining Jack on his very early walks on a bleak morning down The Marina in Cork in the 1980s, is a truly immersive experience. The Paper Man is a beautiful story beautifully told. Billy O’ Callaghan has yet again created a piece of work that engages the reader, weaving in and out across history and through the generations, bringing to life a gorgeous cast of characters with a melancholy yet hopeful tale. Although at times devastating, The Paper Man is an astute and imaginative piece of writing, another glorious novel from this outstanding writer.
In July 2022 I wrote in my review of Life Sentences that Billy O’ Callaghan was a master storyteller and, after reading The Paper Man, I can quite honestly say the same thing again. Reading the words of Billy O’ Callaghan always transports the reader into the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Set across two timelines, 1930s Vienna and 1980s Cork, it was as though I was reading a memoir. And in many ways I was, albeit mixed with fiction, as Billy O’ Callaghan gives us a brief insight into the life of world-renowned Austrian footballer Matthias Sindelar.
Sindelar, known as The Paper Man, played in the famous match between Germany and Austria in April, 1938 to mark the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany. Following the match, the Austrian team would be no more, absorbed into the German national football team. For players like Sindelar, it is unclear how they privately felt about this but, from the history books, it can be assumed he wasn’t a fan, displaying his discontent by kicking the ball into the back of the net and dancing at the end of the game. Sindelar was found dead in his apartment in 1939 under a cloud of suspicion. With The Paper Man, Billy O’ Callaghan creates a dramatic and breath-taking sidebar to Sindelar’s story, through his imagined love affair with a young Jewish girl, Rebekah Schein.
1980s Cork and Jack Shine is going through his mother’s belongings. Growing up in Jewtown, which was once home to a successful and vibrant Jewish community in the city, Jack has always felt welcomed and loved. His mother Rebekah had escaped Vienna as a refugee and Cork was where he was born. As Jack sorts through her stuff, he discovers a box containing ‘mementoes and love letters from another time, with newspaper snippets ‘four badly yellowed newspaper clippings, a pair of faded hand-sized photographs, and a sheaf of letters.’ Jack has never known who his father was but, on looking at the photographs, he begins to wonder. Rebekah died of TB when Jack was ten so he never really knew his mother but now, with this box, Jack might finally discover his true beginnings
‘The letters. God. At forty-one, he’d long since accepted his lot, the missing pieces just a fact of life. Growing up, most of the boys he knew had fathers, but there was scarcely a family in Jewtown spared the damage of the war, at least on some level, kin – extended if not immediate – lost to its brutalities, and in the face of such senseless horror, and the sheer immensity of its magnitude, enquiry seemed futile’
As Jack explores what the contents of this box mean, the reader is transported back to pre-war Austria and into the life of a young girl whose world was about to change. With the beautifully expressive pen of Billy O’ Callaghan we imagine life in Vienna and the surrounding towns at that time. As Hitler’s power strengthens, the fear is tangible, as the lives of many are on the brink of unknown devastation and barbaric cruelty.
The passion between this, on paper, unlikely couple is beautifully depicted. With a large age difference and seemingly opposing lifestyles, Matthias and Rebekah’s relationship was unexpected. But the attraction was unstoppable and their lives soon became intertwined, with Rebekah deciding ‘for certain that whatever this was, whether love or something other, it was all there would ever be for her, and all she needed.’
Up to this point Jack had been relatively settled, working as a stevedore on the Cork docks but now, ‘all of a sudden, peace is lost, and the cacophony of questions has him muddled.’
Billy O’ Callaghan is an exquisite writer. His ability to convey a place and time is cinematic in its descriptions, transporting the reader to wherever a scene is set. Walking the streets of 1930s Vienna in all its opulence or joining Jack on his very early walks on a bleak morning down The Marina in Cork in the 1980s, is a truly immersive experience. The Paper Man is a beautiful story beautifully told. Billy O’ Callaghan has yet again created a piece of work that engages the reader, weaving in and out across history and through the generations, bringing to life a gorgeous cast of characters with a melancholy yet hopeful tale. Although at times devastating, The Paper Man is an astute and imaginative piece of writing, another glorious novel from this outstanding writer.
February 26, 2023
This story begins on the 3rd of April, 1938 in Austria’s capital, Vienna, as the city is gearing up for an event. A game that everyone wants to attend, not only to see Matthias Sindelar in action as he weaves his way over the field, but there are more reasons, one of which is that Hitler will be there, and although Sindelar is not a fan, it makes him all the more determined for his team to win.
’And from today, in the instant that the final whistle is blown, Austria as a national team — and to all intents as a nation — will cease to be.’
Sindelar falls for Rebekah, a girl much younger than him. Soon after, she leaves the home of her parents to live with him. For a time they are cautious of the political climate, and eventually he decides that he needs to get her to a place of safety, and arranges for her to go to stay with relatives in Cork, Ireland. He stays behind. Not very long after she arrives in Ireland, it becomes apparent that she is suffering from morning sickness, and in time she gives birth to a son.
When many years later in the 1980’s, Rebekah’s son, Jack, finds himself tasked with ’stripping bare a house that has really been the only proper home he’s ever known’ he comes across a box, the contents had been wrapped in velvet and tied with ribbon. Four newspaper clippings that were showing their age, small photographs, and letters.
Sifting carefully through this pile, Jack and his wife come across what she believes to be love letters. Since Jack had never known his father, or heard any stories of a father, this is the beginning of a search to determine if this man could possibly be his father. Still, he’s not even sure if he wants to know, if he ever wanted to know.
This is, more or less, how this story begins, weaving in and out of dual timelines as the story continues, and as a search for the truth begins. A story of coming to terms of the loss of a parent you never knew, and a determination to know more about who they were.
O’Callaghan’s story is based on real events and people, a story with a focus on family and identity as it relates to family, as well as how, and who, we love.
Pub Date: 02 May 2023
Many thanks for the ARC provided by David R. Godine, Publisher
July 8, 2024
This was a lovely book so perfectly presented. It's a love story set around a real event in pre-Nazi Austria and told from two different periods. One time period is the 1930s when an Austrian soccer player (nicknamed the Paper Man for his skills on the field) provokes the conquering Nazis with his excellent play and refusal to support Hitler. Even though he is not Jewish, he experiences the fear of German reprisal and tries to fight for his fellow countrymen. He falls in love with a much younger Jewish woman. Intertwining with the Austrian love story is the story of an Irishman in the 1980s who finds some very old letters his mother had saved that appear to hint at a love story and who his father really was. His mother died when he was a young boy, and he has many questions and no one to ask about them. As he tries to piece together what happened between his mother and her correspondent, we see pieces from the past come together. But is what we know and what the Irishman finds out the truth? How much of history can we reliably reconstruct? Although the Paper Man is viewed as a hero by his team and his countrymen, he sometimes makes morally questionable decisions. Quietly and subtly, this author is able to present the face of Nazism and life in Austria and in Ireland while presenting what possibly could have happened. My only regret is that I listened to this book instead of reading it on the page. The narrators were wonderful, but I know I would have stopped more often to enjoy the pure writing. I'll be reading more by this author.
July 20, 2023
A slow, rich, emotional tale of love found and lost in Austria as Europe is on the verge of war in 1936. Toggling between 1930s Austria and 1980s Cork, Ireland, Rebekah, a 19 year old falls for a man 13 years her elder, a football star dubbed Paper Man for how he moves on the field. 40 years later, Rebekah’s son, Jack, finds a dusty box full of papers—letters and three clippings—all in German, in his deceased mother’s closet. Interestingly, these pieces of paper lead him to the father he never knew, the Paper Man, of football legend. Did his father know of him? His mother fled Austria for Cork before she knew she was pregnant and nowhere in the letters is there mention of Jack. With the help of his father in law, and not without some trepidation, Jack retraces his mother’s journey back to Austria to learn a little bit about the man behind the letters. His parents’ story is not an easy one, and he can only know so much so long after they both have died. Which is what made this such a poignant story of a short lived but intense relationship, lived in the moment and untranslatable to the present except in bits and pieces.
June 22, 2023
I loved this book, a mix of romance, historical biopic, personality and heritage. The writing is deceptively subtle. Billy O’Callaghan develops a sense of affectionate intimacy and innocence like no other writer I have read. The amazing thing is that it is difficult to see how he does it; his prose is so clean and spare, there are no fancy flourishes, yet you find yourself inside the skin of these personable, emotional characters, invested in their simple hopes and dreams. He is brave enough to portray the inner earnestness of his characters in a way that most writers simply will not dare. The result is that the humanity of his characters is allowed to ring out, and vibrate over and back through the story. The Paper man is a little outside his normal ambit, but he brings it home to his native city in a meaningful way.
Reading this book is like having an intimate conversation with a loved one. There is no greater pleasure. More please.
Reading this book is like having an intimate conversation with a loved one. There is no greater pleasure. More please.
April 28, 2024
It’s 1930s Vienna, and internationally renowned soccer star Matthais Sindelar, known as The Paper Man, speaks out against Hitler which puts him in Nazi sights. He also falls in love with a Jewish girl named Rebekkah, who escapes to Ireland. She’s pregnant, and three months after her son Jack is born, The Paper Man is found mysteriously dead. The real cause is never discovered. Now it’s 1980’s in the Jewish Quarter of Cork, and Rebekkah’s son Jack discovers a hidden box of letters written to his mother, who died when he was eleven. Jack and his father-in-law travel back to Vienna to uncover the mystery of who his father was. Based on a true story, this is a beautifully-written novel about love, war, fame and soccer. I'm surprised The Paper Man hadn't received more attention in light of the renewal of antisemitism going on in the world today.
July 15, 2023
Quiet, beautifully written story of love and loss, war and soccer. Matthias Sindelar, the Paper Man, was an Austrian soccer star in the 1930’s. After a final match playing for Austria as Germany took over, he met and fell in love with Rebekah. Sensing the dangers ahead, he sent Rebekah to Ireland to live with relatives for her safety. Rebekah gives birth to a baby boy, Jack, but when he is only 10, she dies of tuberculosis. Over 40 years later, Jack discovers a shoe box full of love letters to his mother and starts on a journey to discover his father. From Cork to Vienna the author takes the reader on this quiet quest to understand, under the shadows, in the coffee house, along the river.
July 15, 2023
Moving and well written. I did not realise Matthias Sindelar was a real person whilst reading the story. The fact he was found dead in bed with a girlfriend makes more sense when I understood the author had to incorporate that into the story because it was a fact. It seemed cruel and unlikely as he was so in love with the fictional Rebekah who had only just left his side. We did get hints of his previous womanising and irrestible charm but I was disappointed to think he had reverted to type so soon after the departure of the 'love of his life'
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 19, 2023
A lovely book with interesting cross points of Austria and Ireland . It is about a working class Irish Jew and his discoveries of his holocaust history. It is about birth greatness and goodness and where they sometimes intersect and often diverge . It is a short book and not overly complicated but poignant , with a few surprises. Mostly , it left me with the yearnings of lives unfulfilled and the deep connections of family and romantic love .
The writing was poetic at points , bringing to mind the magic of Irish literature and poems . It seemed at great effort to keep itself small - not out of lack of importance, but out of respect for the everyday man and woman
The writing was poetic at points , bringing to mind the magic of Irish literature and poems . It seemed at great effort to keep itself small - not out of lack of importance, but out of respect for the everyday man and woman
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August 3, 2024Well written novel set in pre WWII Vienna and 1980s Cork, Ireland. A man discovers letters from his mother who passed away years ago that revealed she had a lover in the in up to the war. This novel focuses on the details, almost painstakingly so. The first chapter was 30 pages all about one soccer match. I found it to be really slow so I was putting it down a lot. Hard to tell if it was me or the actual structure of the novel.
July 16, 2024
I can't get into it - just not my cup of tea. Opening with the details of a football match is just my nightmare opening to a novel! I should have researched it better before picking it up. Also not a huge fan of historical fiction, didn't realise it was that either.
I'm sure it's a good book for others
I'm sure it's a good book for others
July 17, 2023
It's a mystery.
It's a love story.
It's got the drama of high-level European football (soccer), the apprehension as the Nazis take-over of Austria, the dissimilar flavors of life between Vienna and Cork, and truly wonderful characters involved in a beautifully crafted storyline.
It's a love story.
It's got the drama of high-level European football (soccer), the apprehension as the Nazis take-over of Austria, the dissimilar flavors of life between Vienna and Cork, and truly wonderful characters involved in a beautifully crafted storyline.
August 11, 2023
What an astoundingly tender and beautiful book. “…strolling without sense of what lay ahead or even what was really happening in their lives, and holding her hand simply because she was his mother and he loved her.”
August 28, 2023
I made it about 100 pages into this dual timeline story of love in the beginning of World War Two Vienna and life in Ireland in the 50s before I just gave up. Didn't care about the people, the "mystery" wasn't much of a mystery and the love story a bit too much for me.
September 17, 2024
Top Class read .. beautifully written and very well spaced out. I normally only read nonfiction and often hate these 2 time period structured books/films but this was quite brilliant. Loved every page of it ❤️
June 20, 2023
So I have read at least 60 WWII books, this one is at the very top. It is very well written and by the end I was sobbing. Character development was like I really knew these people.
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