The Third Reel

In 1986 Etienne Nieuwenhuis leaves Pretoria for London to escape military service, taking along little but the Blake prints he treasured as a child. He takes up with Axel, a German who lives in a squat among drifting young artists at war with the bankers of the City. In the crumbling flat of Axel’s dying grandfather Ariel, once one of the Jewish filmmakers forced out of Berlin by the Nazis, Etienne comes upon the first reel of a lost 1933 film drawn from Walter Benjamin’s memories of his Berlin childhood. Tracking down the rest turns into a detective story that leads him to Axel’s stepfather in a still-divided Berlin, and to Buenos Aires, where the blind and senile Irmgard, who helped make the film, can no longer explain anything. Almost everyone here is in exile.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, 1986–1990

First published

2017 by Umuzi

Author's age

47 when first published

ISBN

9781415207475 (original)

9781415207727 (Umuzi, South Africa)

9781784631505 (Salt Publishing, United Kingdom)