A Year in Reading: Anuradha Roy By Anuradha Roy posted at 11:00 am on December 16, 2016 One of my treasured discoveries this year was Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life . Originally published in German in 2014, and translated by Charlotte Collins , this is a short novel told with apparent artlessness, but from the very first page you know it’s about to rearrange your mental universe. It is a breathtaking, heartbreaking story that encapsulates a universe of change, loss, resilience — in about 24,000 words. A Whole Life is, quite literally, the whole life of taciturn, hard-working Andreas Egger, from the day he comes to the mountain village as an orphan with a leather pouch of money around his neck, to his death many decades later. He is by turn a laborer, a soldier, a guide to the mountains, and through the course of his life modernity comes to his village in the form of electricity, machine guns, and tourists. He is crushed by forces of both nature and man t