Rachel Seiffert

A vivid, hallucinatory rediscovered classic about split identity in the wake of World War I trauma, translated into English for the first time. "Unsettling... Creates a picture of a tormented mind, and evokes the profound dislocation felt by veterans returning home from a savage conflict." -The TimesIn this searingly poetic novel, we are plunged into the disturbed consciousness of an ex-soldier suffering post-traumatic stress.
It is a world in which nothing is stable-not even the identity of the narrator. Hans, an esteemed surgeon, has just returned from the hellish battlefields of World War I. Shaken by his experiences and severely doubtful of the promised bright future after the war, he returns to the life of a Berlin doctor that he left 4 years ago. But now, everything in his home feels alien-even his wife, Grete. As he tries to regain a sense of normality, he is haunted by nightmarish visions and a profound sense of dissociation.
Has the war turned him into someone else? Or has another man wormed his way into Hans's life in his absence? Tormented by doubts about even the simplest facts, the troubled Hans grows increasingly convinced that neither he nor those around him are who they believe themselves to be. Told in a feverish monologue, A Shadow of Myself is a vivid, hallucinatory immersion in an unsettled mind. First published in 1926 and rediscovered in Germany only last year, this lightning-bolt of a war classic is now appearing in English for the first time in a stunning translation by Simon Pare.