Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger. "Ninety years is not such a long time in the scheme of things: the life of a person, if they are lucky; a room just wide enough to touch both walls with outstretched hands. In other places such a building might have seen only the soft swell of progress, but here? Ninety years of drama, followed only by this. " It is the autumn of 2001 in Berlin. In a once-grand building, on a forgotten corner of the city, an unlikely friendship is about to change two people's lives. Walter Baum is nearing forty. After a failed attempt to work as an actor in Hollywood sixteen years ago, he's been dubbing the lines of a famous American movie star into German, sitting in the dark, watching his bald spot and beer belly expand while his options and self-confidence diminish. In an identical apartment just downstairs, a young American woman named Hope rarely gets out of the bathtub. Having fled New York a month earlier to join her workaholic husband in Berlin, she is unable to cope with either the unfamiliar city around her or painful memories of the one she just left. When they meet by chance in the elevator, a sympathy develops, and then deepens, as together they begin to unravel secrets buried in the walls of their building and in their own personal histories. Against the backdrop of Berlin, a once-divided city in the process of reconstructing itself, Hope and Walter finally come to reconcile their hopes for the future with the ache of the past that lingers, permanently, beneath the surface. Funny and moving, insightful and inspiring, This Must Be the Place is an expertly crafted debut novel about the events that impact us irrevocably and the friendships that make us whole. For updated information about reviews, readings and appearances, please check out the News Blog. THIS MUST BE THE PLACE. "Stealthily original. In This Must Be the Place , Winger avoids the braggadocio of typical expatriate fiction, telling a story rooted in universal human emotions - love, loneliness, grief, fear of change and, yes, hope - among people whose identity is more complicated than their citizenship." It is a rare and wonderful experience to be understood. To read the rest of this fantastic review, please click here. The gorgeous illustration of Sally Bowles hugging the Berlin Bear that accompanied the review is by Monika Aichele. Wednesday, February 25, 2009. Review in The Forward. The Jewish Daily Forward says "It’s a pleasure to read a story about finding oneself again not though romance but through friendship." This Must Be the Place. The world’s #1 eTextbook reader for students. VitalSource is the leading provider of online textbooks and course materials. More than 15 million users have used our Bookshelf platform over the past year to improve their learning experience and outcomes. With anytime, anywhere access and built-in tools like highlighters, flashcards, and study groups, it’s easy to see why so many students are going digital with Bookshelf. titles available from more than 1,000 publishers. customer reviews with an average rating of 9.5. digital pages viewed over the past 12 months. institutions using Bookshelf across 241 countries. This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger and Publisher Riverhead Books (P-US). Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9781440638749, 1440638748. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9781594489976, 1594489971. This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger and Publisher Riverhead Books (P-US). Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9781440638749, 1440638748. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9781594489976, 1594489971. We’ll Always Have Berlin. The phrase “an American in Paris” conjures up one word — l’amour . Whether it’s Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in an exuberant Gershwin musical or Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in a subdued indie film, the popular conception of Paris hasn’t changed for a century or more. It remains as pastel and sugar-​coated as candied almonds, as romantic as an arm-enlaced stroll along the Seine. But what does “an American in Berlin” suggest, 70 years after Sally Bowles exited the Kit Kat Club, and almost 20 years after the fall of the Wall? For Hope, a third-grade teacher who has followed her workaholic husband, Dave, from New York to Berlin after 9/11, it suggests “Nervenzusammenbruch ” — nervous breakdown. That word comes to mind as Hope, who speaks no German, wanders the aisles of a drugstore, trying to buy hair conditioner but unsure which cluster of consonants and vowels means “cream rinse” as opposed to “shampoo, say, or shower gel or body lotion.”(The answer: Pflegespülung. For extra credit, “smooth & silky” is glatt & seidig. ) She ends up opening bottle after bottle, testing the liquids on her hand, trying to guess which one will detangle her hair and soothe her nerves. But it wouldn’t be fair to make the German language take the fall for Hope’s distress: it will require more than shiny hair and a Berlitz guide to set her head straight. She has come to Berlin not only to flee post-ground-zero panic but to recover from a personal tragedy whose details emerge as the novel progresses. “I needed to leave New York,” she tells her lone German friend. “I was relieved to have somewhere else to go.” Hope is the decidedly unheroic heroine of Anna Winger’s stealthily original first novel, “This Must Be the Place,” an unretouched yet touching portrait of a woman, a man and a city in flux. The woman, of course, is Hope. The man is not her neglectful husband but a neighbor in her gentrified Charlottenburg apartment building, a washed-up German television star named Walter Baum, who coasted through his 20s and 30s on the proceeds from dubbing Tom Cruise’s voice in the German-language releases of Cruise’s hit films. Now 39, freshly dumped by his much younger girlfriend, Walter ponders a return trip to Los Angeles (where he spent some time in the ’80s, playing Prince Charming at Disneyland) but buys no ticket. Instead, he broods, telling himself that he could have been a contender if he’d stayed longer in Hollywood — and if he hadn’t developed a bald spot. Bald spot or no bald spot, to get much use from a passport, you have to pick yourself up off the couch and make it to an airport. And to get a callback from a casting director, you have to show up for an audition. For Walter, those are both missions impossible. Instead, he sulks and takes a gig dubbing “Vanilla Sky” for a director who calls himself Orson Welles, (real name, Ludwig Schmitz). “For a long time now,” Winger writes, “his voice had been playing the hero while his body sat in the dark, eating ham sandwiches and candy bars and counting the cash.” While Walter watches old videos of “Jerry Maguire” and “A Few Good Men,” Hope soaks in her bathtub a few stories below, waiting for her Pflegespülung to wash her troubles away. German? American? Nationality doesn’t enter into it. Hope and Walter are spooked by the stranger in the mirror, not the strangers on the street, and they’ve made geography the scapegoat for their detachment. Orson gives them a wake-up call: “Wherever you go, there you are,” he tells Hope, quoting from the film “Buckaroo Banzai,” adding, “I consider myself a citizen of the world.” Don’t we all. In “This Must Be the Place,” Winger avoids the braggadocio of typical expatriate fiction, telling a story rooted in universal human emotions — love, loneliness, grief, fear of change and, yes, hope — among people whose identity is more complicated than their citizenship. The story of American adventures abroad is usually told by people who speak the language of their host country, or don’t need to. In the 1990s, as the Iron Curtain thrust aside its blackout blinds, a band of entrepreneurial Americans headed for the new Russia, where a command of the language was essential for anyone who wanted to gin up a joint venture, conduct an interview or negotiate a taxi fare. At about the same time, a delegation of disaffected college grads set out to sample the expat lifestyle in post-Soviet-bloc Prague, where rents were low and knowledge of Czech was nonessential. (As a sign of just how irrelevant Czechness could be to the experience, the best-known American novel commemorating that era, Arthur Phillips’s “Prague,” was actually set in Budapest.) But in the last decade, a new crew of searchers have landed with their wheelie bags in reunited Berlin, where rents are low and German comes in very handy (though English can serve, in a pinch … ein Bisschen). How can an American woman like Hope, who can’t read a German map and mistakenly thinks public transport is free, manage to fit in? At first, she doesn’t think she can. As Dave works long hours, abandoning her for days on end during business trips to Poland, Hope feels as if she were clinging to a “sinking raft adrift in a sea of strangers.” Over the phone, her mother, home in the Midwest, urges her to be more outgoing; “You really only need one friend, in my experience,” she counsels. But Hope lacks the vocabulary and the gumption to accost passersby. Instead, she tries to befriend the city itself.