View from a High Window
The novellas featured in View from a High Window provide a clear image of Ben Pastor’s narrative art, both as a mystery writer and as an author who has chosen historical narrative as the fulcrum of her work. At the center, we find Martin Heinz Douglas von Bora, the guiding character of Ben Pastor’s imagination, here “photographed” in eight different but intimately connected moments, according to the method of the short story or novella intended as a chapter of an actual choral novel: therefore, a series of criminal cases to solve, two war fronts distanced in space and time (the Russian-Eastern front of Operation Barbarossa and the Italian post September 8, 1943), but a single red thread constituted by the tormented inner evolution of the character.
Created on the partial model of Claus von Stauffenberg, the unfortunate would-be assassin of Hitler in July 1944, Martin Bora is a paradigmatic and exemplary figure of all the ideological and spiritual lacerations that characterized the Twentieth century, the “short century” of three mass totalitarianisms and two world wars. A career officer in the German army who is lent to investigative activity by superior orders or simple chance, Bora must face not only intricate criminal mysteries, but also, perhaps above all, the paradoxes that arise from his uncomfortable position as a “righteous man in the wrong uniform”…
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