Munich Airport (31 page)

1. Do you have any close relatives who have settled abroad or moved far away? How has distance changed your relationship with them?
   
2. The first time the narrator meets Miriam's neighbor Otis, he says, “At no time in history have human beings had less freedom, less happiness.” Why do you think he says this? Do you agree or disagree with him, and why?
   
3. What are the sources of unhappiness in the narrator's life? Is there a difference between grief and unhappiness? Do you see such a distinction in the narrator's life?
   
4. The narrator's father writes that “The historian of tragic events, especially […] must cultivate guilt, must find infinite ways to implicate himself in every injustice and atrocity that has ever transpired, and be unworthy of all the heroism and courage that has resisted injustice.” How does this way of thinking inform the narrative of MUNICH AIRPORT? In what ways does the narrator cultivate guilt?
   
5. Why does Miriam starve herself? Does the narrator have the same reasons for choosing to endure hunger?
   
6. The narrator and his father react to Miriam's death by indulging—in food, alcohol, and luxurious accommodations. Miriam's restraint and their indulgence serve psychological as well as physical functions. Do you tend toward excess or restriction in your own life? How are the two practices similar? How are they different?
   
7. Would you intervene if you were worried about a friend or relative's health, or would you refrain from commenting on someone else's personal choices?
   
8. How would you describe the relationship that Trish develops with the narrator's father? How does she fit into the novel's family dynamic?
   
9. The characters in MUNICH AIRPORT are separated by physical distance, but there is also an emotional distance between them. Do you think that physical separation led to their emotional disconnect, or did it happen the other way around?
   
10. Do you think the narrator changes during the course of the novel? Do you see his visit to Germany in the wake of his sister's death as a traumatic or healing experience?
    
11. What future do you imagine for the narrator and his father?
    
12. The novel ends with a memory of the narrator rowing a boat on a lake in the mountains while the people onshore wave at him. Does this episode strike you as one of hopelessness or wonder—as affirming beauty or negating it?
    

A Preparation for Death

The Apartment

“Baxter has written a novel of subtle beauty and quiet grace; I found myself hanging on every simple word, as tense about the consequences of a man finding an apartment as if I were reading about a man defusing a bomb…It is one of the best novels I have read in a long time.”

—Stacey D'Erasmo,
New York Times Sunday Book Review

“Absorbing, atmospheric and enigmatic…With its disorienting juxtaposition of the absolutely ordinary and the strange and vaguely threatening, the novel evokes the work of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, while its oblique explorations of memory suggest a debt to W. G. Sebald…Baxter's provocative, unsettling novel is, among other things, about the inexorability of identity and ‘the immortality of violence.'”

—
Los Angeles Times

“Despite the lack of incident, the novel exerts a hypnotic force…It is precisely this sort of subversion, along with the author's shimmering prose, that makes THE APARTMENT such a surprisingly compelling read and so apropos; it captures the mood of the current moment and what seems to be a new ‘lost generation,' one formed not so much by exposure to violence as immunity to and alienation from it. Once upon a time, there was no place like home; in Mr. Baxter's world, home, it seems, is no place.”

—Adam Langer,
New York Times

“In this bleak but affecting novel, an unnamed American expat spends a day walking through a frigid, unidentified European city in search of an apartment. The narrator is a veteran who subsequently amassed a small fortune working as a civilian contractor in Iraq; he calls America ‘the kingdom of ambitious stupidity' and has chosen his new home at random, wanting to live ‘in a cold city,' where extremes of emotion are ‘extinct.' What he really wants, though, is to rub away all traces of personality—to ‘anonymize' himself and live purely in the present tense. The details of his day are rendered with anaesthetized precision and achieve a cumulative force of grief, equanimity, and resolve.”

—
New Yorker

“A true gem…Lucid, often hypnotic and, at times, even transporting. [Baxter] keeps his sentences short, his adjectives limited, his pacing leisurely. The paragraphs are long and there are no chapter breaks, yet his acute observation means this is no mere minimalist undertaking…The Iraq sections are astonishingly well done, and the man's history as a Naval officer feels almost exactly right to the former Naval officer who happens to be writing this review.”

—
Los Angeles Review of Books

“The shadows of James Joyce and
Ulysses
loom over THE APARTMENT as Baxter takes us on an elaborate and riveting one-day ride down our hero's rapids-racked stream of consciousness. He pounds the icy pavement of the city with a young woman named Saskia. Memories—some sanguine, others violent—spiral through the un-chaptered (and nearly dialogue-free) text. Baxter's ear for detailed, unpredictable inner dialogue is keen. He guides us with precision and nuance through this man's mind, a prickled fog where anxiety and resentment and optimism and guilt swirl together in a solo conversation that builds carefully and deliberately…Violence, lurking offstage throughout the story, makes a shocking entrance near the end, setting in place everything that's come before. The effect is devastating, in the most satisfying way.”

—
Denver Post

“In a year marked by epics, it's a relief to delve into this quiet, surprisingly tense debut novel—small enough to fit into a stocking but packing a huge emotional punch.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“In just over 200 pages, THE APARTMENT impressively and tactfully covers everything from the effects of American interventionism on its relationship with Europe to questions of personal identity.”

—
Esquire

“‘I was born to hate the place I came from.' Greg Baxter's first novel THE APARTMENT is a short but powerful exploration of that sentiment, uttered halfway through the novel by its narrator, a 41-year-old American ex-Navy officer and Iraq War veteran.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“A beautiful meditation on brutality and culture, which are sometimes one and the same.”

—
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“An elegant portrait of a man half-fractured, half-intact—a postwar somebody caught between repair and capitulation, controlling his own fate and imprisoned by regret.”

—
Texas Observer

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