Written from the point of view of a man whose sister was found dead of starvation in her Berlin apartment, this is the story of his father and his trip to Germany to bring the body back to the USA. It takes place in Munich Airport as they wait for a connecting flight and seemlessly flows back and forth between the present and the past as the narrator thinks about his journey. ( )

This is a beautifully sparse, minimalist work about the atomisation of society, loneliness, loss and the meaninglessness of much of modern living. The nameless and almost faceless narrator, and his nameless and almost characterless father have come to Germany to retrieve the body of the narrator's sister, Miriam, who in a world of plenty has chosen to starve herself to death (the word anorexia is never once mentioned).

As they wait at Munich Airport with American consulate official Trish (who has separation problems of her own), about to return to America with Miriam's body, father and son's last three weeks in Germany are recounted in flashback, as are various episodes in the family's life. The main motif is loneliness and emptiness. The father, a retired History lecturer, roams his large house, empty after the death of his wife, occasionally watching golf. His son, a marketing consultant based in London, goes from working for a large company to working for himself, seeming to isolate himself yet further. Apart from occasional cold sex, he seems to have few connections. Even Miriam, starving herself in Berlin may seem empowering, but she seems to have had few friends - getting her Berlin contacts together for memorial drinks is hard work.

Father and son spend their time in Germany, as they wait for the body to be released, in first a burst of gluttony, then in denial. They feel sick - not hungry. And as they wait in Munich Airport for their plane, delayed by fog, the narrator becomes ever more grief stricken and gradually loses his iron self discipline and control

This is an excellent book with scarcely a word out of place. Minus half a star for an incident that displays the father's relative helplessness that I thought unnecessarily scatalogical. And if you are setting your book in an airport, you need to get flight details right (an Etihad flight would be leaving for Abu Dhabi not Dubai). But generally excellent ( )

Although throughout this unsettling novel we are in Munich Airport with the narrator, his father and Trish, a consular official, waiting for a delayed plane to Atlanta that will take them and the body of their siser / daughter, Miriam, who has died of starvation in Berlin. This is enough to make any reader realise that this is not a feel good novel. The novel is unsettling through the structure, there are no chapters and paragraphs are long and the action is sometimes in the airport in linear time and sometimes in the past and at other times recalls the last two weeks that they have been in Germany sorting out Miriam's affairs and taking a road trip along the Rhine. The brother and father's reaction to Miriam's death is understandable; they firstly binge on high living and good food and then stop eating and fast, enjoying the light-headedness of not eating. The novel is deep but not always clear and as the narrator, the brother makes little attempt to understand his actions, lost as he is in the grief of losing his sister and recalling the few times he had seen her in the past ten years or so. I found I was lost in the chilling and distressing environment of this novel, I was in transit in the airport, waiting. ( )

An ex-pat American living in London learns that his sister, Miriam, who had been living in Berlin has died of starvation. The news is both a shock and possibly expected. At any rate, it catalyses arcane reactions in her brother, who has not spoken to her in at least five years, and in their elderly widowed father whose estrangement from her extends even further into the past. Father and son meet in Berlin and undertake the repatriation of the body with the help of a consular official named Trish. Apparently standard bureaucratic delay prevents the release of the body for more than two weeks. And in that time both father and son, and to a lesser extent Trish, undergo flights of alienation and excess — renting a furnished luxury penthouse, hiring a car to undertake a trip down the Rhine and into Belgium and Luxembourg, immodest gourmandising, drinking to excess, sexual profligacy, and self-harm. This, followed by a starvation diet which may purge them of both their excess and their reason. Once Miriam’s body is released, they can begin their journey home. The father has chosen to fly them all out of Munich Airport so that they will not need to change planes, but when they reach Munich, the airport is socked in with heavy sleet and fog. So much so that their flight — indeed all flights — has been delayed interminably. And this is where we pick up the story with the brother narrating their current predicament interspersed with reflections on what has preceded that in the previous two weeks as well as earlier moments in the lives of Miriam, her brother and her father.

In the stateless state of those who have already passed through security at an international airport, grounded by the murky fog that paralyses airports and action, and faced with a constitutional ambivalence about his father, himself and everything else, we follow the brother’s not always trustworthy impressions. But ultimately nothing is clear or fully explained. An underlying sense of menace pervades but it has no clear source. Emotions are fractured and changeable. And perhaps the only moments of clarity come when the son speaks about the advent of twelve-tone music and especially the music of Alban Berg.

That singular break with tonality seems also to be the model for Baxter’s treatment of the novel. Not so much a case of anti-narrative as the abandonment of narrative, or rather narrative as the underpinning structure of the novel. Themes of death and excess cross against those of loss and abandonment or harm and self-harm. But there is no centre, per se, and so we are carried along solely by the power of Baxter’s prose itself. And what prose that is! I was transfixed. Constantly unsettled. And ultimately a bit in awe. This is a novel that warrants re-reading almost immediately. Highly recommended. ( )

I picked up this novel on a whim, knowing nothing about it. Usually, this ends badly for me, but this is the exception that will keep me bringing books home based solely on the cover and descriptions written on the dust jacket.

The nameless narrator and protagonist is in Germany, helping his father bring home the body of his sister, who has died in her apartment in Berlin. The narrative takes place entirely within a long fog delay at the Munich airport, and the format of the novel is that of one man narrating the wait with his frail father and the official from the American consulate in Berlin who has been guiding them through the process. His memories range back through his childhood to the weeks spent waiting in Berlin for his sister's body to be released by the coroner. The format makes the absence of quotation marks and the way the novel jumps around feel entirely natural; we are accompanying this man as he spends his hours in the airport with his father or walking aimlessly about, privy to his random thoughts and rising agitation.

Munich Airport feels a lot like Herman Koch's The Dinner, with a growing sense of something being wrong, although this is a much more restrained falling apart. The sister was troubled and distanced herself from her family, especially after her mother died. There were long stretches between encounters with her brother, making the changes in her stand out all the more. But the narrator has also been unsuccessful in many ways. He's in his forties, and despite a modest success in freelance consulting, he is remarkably unmoored to anyone.

This is not a cheerful novel, but it is a good one. And the way it's written gives it a forward momentum that kept me reading. ( )