The Night Bell

by Megan Weiler

"This is a beautiful, painstaking account of a daughter's fraught relationship with her father. It is full of meticulous observation and sharp knowledge of the power of cruelty and the power of love. The tone is astringent and graceful, cool and detached, but the undertone is one of deep and abiding pain. The clarity of the writing alone offers a sort of healing." - Colm Tóibín Hailed as a genius early in his career as a biologist, Irene's father, now at retirement, is a man who has lost his way. The narrative revolves around two visits made by Irene, one to her former home in Germany and the other to a vacation house in Italy. Through memories, dreams, and stories she has been told about the family's past in Nazi Germany, she tries to come to terms with her father's alcoholism and the dissolution of her parents' marriage. The result is a complex and ultimately redemptive portrait. The Times Literary Supplement "[The] floating apart, of present from past and of one identity from another, is the concern of Weiler's lucid and intelligent novel. ... Unlike many novels in the same broad subject category, The Night Bell resorts neither to melodrama nor to grimness; nor does it attempt to give reasons for the onset and slowly destructive course of Christof's alcoholism. Instead, Weiler's style offers its own illumination. She skillfully allows individual incidents to take on significance. ... The movement between recollection and present observation is beautifully paced." - Annmarie Drury (TLS, July 27, 2001)

242 pages, Paperback

Published June 16, 2020

Reviews

[Christine]

A very intense, personal description of a woman's relationship with her father. He is never really described from any one else's perspective, so I feel at times it was unrelenting. He was not a likeable man and his drinking severly impacted on all who dealt with him.It was a raw,sad experience, beautifully written.

[William Caferro]

Beautifully written, profound and moving...

[Kate Bullard Adams]

In prose that rings as clear and true as the bell of the book's title, Megan Weiler envelops the reader in the world of Irene, a young woman of piercing insight and intensity. Irene is struggling to come to terms with her father, a biologist whose narcissism and alcohol addiction undermined what was expected to be a brilliant career while leaving him with a capacity for cruelty consistent with his failed genius.

In our current world of throwaway words, reading The Night Bell is a call to arms: What we write and say matters. Words carry weight. Those in this compelling novel are proof of that, and Megan Weiler is to be thanked for sharing them with such conscience and care.