Down The Rabbit Hole: The Rover Review

Kit Jenkin reviews This Great Escape in Montreal's splendid Rover:

The form of the narrative is the book’s most compelling part. Steinmetz admits that he “planned to spit out the book chronologically, but as it is, my hard drive is crammed with research notes, transcriptions of family letters, photographs and multiple drafts of the endless permutations of my book so far.” As a result, major themes of this book are dislocation and alienation. Fittingly, the narrative is constructed around fragmented scenes and details of Paryla’s life, jumping from scene to detail and from narrative prose, to movie scripts, transcripts, lists, and emails, all in an attempt to piece his cousin’s life together.

The choice of abandoning normal linear memoir is important. One section of the book that beautifully illustrates the need to follow an unconventional form is a chapter that describes Steinmetz’s online research during his travels. Using an online search engine’s automatic translation feature for comments left on a German film review site, Steinmetz uncovers things that symbolize his whole project. One comment on The Great Escape translates into English from German as follows: “Class film, shot in the never get bored, despite the length. Even top performances by actors. As a teenager, I liked the film really happy, but when I look at it today, I find the humour inappropriate, especially the cheerful music theme.” In many ways, this literal translation with its disparate elements and non sequiturs is representative of the author’s holistic approach.

Full review here.

Stardust Memories - The Brooklyn Rail Review

Noah Isenberg has contributed quite a nice review of This Great Escape, in The Brooklyn Rail, calling the thing "strange, elegiac, and intoxicating " :

"Throughout his idiosyncratic mix of travelogue, family memoir, and elliptical musings, Steinmetz entertains the thought that there might be some kind of hidden, causal connection between his cousin’s ironic, possibly ill-advised choice to play a Gestapo agent in The Great Escape and his premature death. “Michael Paryla as a Nazi, on the map,” he writes, “not 30 years after his parents fled by train through the same neck of the woods: who catches this on film?” (In truth, it wasn’t totally uncommon for actors once persecuted by Hitler to play Nazis on screen—think of Conrad Veidt in Casablanca or Otto Preminger in Stalag 17.) Oddly enough, the film becomes the final resting place for his cousin: “57 seconds all counting—before we lose sight of him for good, on-screen and off, stardust to rust, so it goes and so it must.” Or, as Steinmetz remarks of his cousin elsewhere, almost suggesting the docu-fantasia mode of fellow Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s work: “Alive but not living, stranded in the no-man’s-land of a motion picture.”

Full review here.

Montreal Gazette Review : Breaking Out of Convention

Andrew Steinmetz uses The Great Escape to explore his family history and invent his own genre

Fifty years ago, John Sturges’s The Great Escape was the movie of the moment. Based (with a few liberties taken) on the attempt by a group of mostly British PoWs to break out of the German prison camp Stalag Luft III in 1944, the film drew critical raves and racked up huge box office numbers. Viewers left theatres with the indelible image of Steve McQueen — well, OK, his stuntman stand-in — jumping a barbed-wire fence on his iconic Triumph motorcycle. Told that a new book is revisiting the movie on its golden anniversary, then, you’d be forgiven for assuming it would be a star-studded set of reminiscences. What you won’t be expecting is an examination of the life of a bit-part actor whose role in the film is so small his name doesn’t even appear in the credits. But that’s what Andrew Steinmetz has written, and you’ll be glad he did.

Read on...

Unheimlich / Uncanny * National Post Review

Google the German word unheimlich, and you will find the English-language Wikipedia page for “uncanny.” Google Translate “uncanny” into German, and “unheimlich” will appear. But the words have distinct roots: Wikipedia says that “uncanny” derives from the Anglo-Saxon ken, or knowledge, and means “something outside one’s familiar knowledge or perceptions.”

“Unheimlich” breaks down as “un-home-like.” In This Great Escape, Andrew Steinmetz pursues the uncanny in the English sense, by investigating the story of a distant cousin, Michael Paryla, who died in Hamburg not long after he appeared, uncredited, as a Gestapo agent in the 1963 film, The Great Escape.

FULL REVIEW Here

Toronto Star Review

This beguiling biography, This Great Escape — shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction — follows Ottawa writer Andrew Steinmetz deep into the “Hansel and Gretel woods,” searching for answers about a German cousin, Michael Paryla, whom he never met. Steinmetz has trodden these woods before, winning the 2009 Ottawa Book Award for Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, his novelistic memoir about Michael’s mother — who was also Steinmetz’s great aunt.

Growing up, Steinmetz knew only that his cousin acted in the 1963 hit movie, The Great Escape, and that he died of an overdose. Michael is a mystery demanding to be solved, obsession be damned.

FULL REVIEW by Nancy Wigston here.

It Ain't No Pipe Dream

I've been thinking about this one for a long, long time and now it's about done, thanks to a long list of people, not least Dan Wells of Biblioasis. Strange how these things work out; how the past comes together in the present. About a decade ago, I had an intense  conversation in a bar in Montreal with Dan about Diana Athill's memoir Stet. I hadn't met Dan thirty minutes and there we were in Cafe da Poete exchanging notes on literary projects. Ten years passed, when I watched from afar the good work Dan was doing at Biblioasis, before I sent along my manuscript. Well, it's a good thing too. Thanks to Dan and the talented people at his shop in Stalag Windsor, This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla will be published this fall. Something like eight years in the making...it ain't no pipe dream no more.

Unnecessary Travel Lengthens The War

1963. The Great Escape – 
The Mirisch Company Inc. Presents

INT. TRAIN COMPARTMENT – DAY. 

The door opens and a Gestapo agent enters. He glances at the identity cards offered by a pair of SS officers. Not of interest, not on his list. In total there are 76 escaped prisoners from Stalag Luft III and Hitler has ordered a nation-wide manhunt, ein Grossfahndung. The Gestapo agent moves forward and then stops when he comes face to face with the actors Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson, escaped POWs disguised as businessmen on the Berlin-Breslau train. There is something about them.

A complete chapter from my upcoming book, This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla, can be found here at the CNQ blog.

The Non-Fiction Thing

It was inspiring to find a recent post about Eva's Threepenny Theatre by Cristina Pietropaolo at The CanLit Thing, just as I am finishing up a book about Eva's son, Michael Paryla. Michael was an actor like his mother and father. Before his death in Hamburg, in 1967, he had a small part in John Sturge's The Great Escape. Actually, he played a Gestapo agent; and here he is on a train in the movie about to have words with Richard Attenborough and David McCallum:

In Eva's Threepenny Theatre, I give only a page to Michael's story. I have spent the last five years finding out about him. The book will be called This Great Escape - The Case of Michael Paryla.