The Siberian Odyssey of Hans Schroeder
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The Siberian Odyssey of Hans Schroeder

by Ashis Gupta
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Based on true events, The Siberian Odyssey of Hans Schroeder is the ironic and tragic story of a young German mesmerized by the Hitler Youth aura who finds himself on the WW2 Russian front where he is taken prisoner.

Released from a Siberian POW camp years later, he returns home to Wiesbaden, confused and tormented. He marries in Germany and eventually emigrates with his family to Massachusetts, USA. This is less a story of war than the trauma and psychological dislocations it spawns. Added to that is the ideological and cultural displacements that moving to a new country often brings about.

As the story opens in the 1970s, we find Hans sitting in a Massachusetts courthouse watching the jury selection for his trial on two counts of murder. As the trial moves on, riddled with conflicting psychiatric testimonies from experts, there emerges the picture of broken but complex human being, a kind man who once loved, among other things, the music of Wagner.

Contributors

Ashis Gupta, author

Ashis Gupta is the author or editor of over twelve works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. A Canadian of Indian origin he studied under John Malcolm Brinnin, Mary Carter, and Anne Sexton in Boston University's Creative Writing program. He completed his PhD dissertation on 17th century English poetry. He has taught at Boston and Harvard Universities, in New Delhi, Johannesburg and Cuba. In 1971 he served as a War Correspondent for the 'Boston Phoenix' in the India-Pakistan War in Bangladesh. Co-founder of Bayeux Arts in 1994 which debuted with a short-list for the 1994 Booker Prize with George Mackay Brown’s “Beside the Ocean of Time”, Ashis makes his home in Calgary, Canada.

Reviews

  • Ashis Gupta's little novel astounds me. Tightly written and beautifully structured, it speaks, through many voices, of the tortured life of a sensitive soul. What astonishes me is that this Indian writer [...] has entered so fully into the anguish of an European mind and communicates it so well without any intrusion, in thought or language, of his own cultural ethos [...]. - Visa Ravindran, Indian Review of Books

Rights Holder

Rights Holder: Bayeux Arts, Inc.

email: ashis.bayeux@gmail.com

website: https://www.bayeux.com

rights available: World

Additional Information

number of pages: 194

publication date: 10/15/2014

Original language of pub: English