Volume 34, Number 10 · June 11, 1987
A Family Fortune
By Gabriele Annan
The Afternoon Sun
by David Pryce-Jones
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 214 pp., $15.95
David Pryce-Jones's fierce new novel is a four-generation family saga. It begins with the narrator's great-grandfather, a foundling born 'either in 1839 or 1840,' and brought up in the Jewish orphanage at Nuremberg. At the age of ten or so he runs away to Vienna and is taken in by a childless banker and his wife: 'They wanted an errand-boy but really it was a son they were after.' Gustav turns out to be good at finance (David Pryce-Jones is too, dealing efficiently with matters like the Gründerzeit expansion of the 1860s, the Austrian stock exchange collapse of 1873, how to open foreign bank accounts, postwar inflation, and several momentous board meetings). Gustav is taken into partnership by his patron, buys into the new railways to the east (in 1873, precisely), from that position into rolling stock, and finally comes to own the Concordia steelworks which 'in the following century would rival the Ruhr concerns.'
Review, 2700 words
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