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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Escape by Adam Thirlwell (view source)
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When we first meet seventy-eight year-old Raphael Haffner, he is hiding in a spa hotel closet watching a twenty-something year-old yoga instructor (who knows he's there) having sex with her boyfriend (who doesn't). Haffner is a British, Jewish former banker who is staying at the spa in Central Europe while on a mission to reclaim his dead wife's villa that was confiscated by the Nazis in the war. Thirlwell's narrator, some fifty years younger than Haffner (ie the age of the author), describes the aging ageing libertine Haffner as ''lustful, selfish, vain - an entirely commonplace man''. Charming.
But it's not really a plot-driven novel. Interspersed with trying to develop two affairs - one with the ever flexible yoga teacher, Zinka, and another with a middle aged, married resident of the spa - with varying amounts of success, are Haffner's recollections about his Jewish childhood in North London, fighting in Africa in the war, his banking career and various loves including his deceased wife, jazz and cricket amongst other things.
