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2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
The Badenweiler Waltz Mar 17, 2008
By J. Elaine Logan
"I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Waltz." It left me with a feeling of hope and encouragement. The characters are warm and real. While Elizabeth has problems, she also has the courage to face them, overcoming the negative, achieving the positive, and therefore offering hope to all who would embrace life and be willing to chance "dancing." It is one of the most positive stories about life and its living that I've read. I highly recommend it!"
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
G.W. Kroeker's Best Work Jan 15, 2008
By D. R. Bone
I, too, have followed G. W. Kroeker's writing career and eagerly awaited publication of THE BADENWEILER WALTZ. This wonderful novel was worth the wait. It is the best of his work--richly layered, wonderfully complex and so finely written. I cared about all the characters but especially Elizabeth--with her few joys, plentiful regrets, and yet a hopeful heart. The author has an equisite gift for creating a sense of place, food and wine that made me nearly be able to see, smell and taste what he was describing.
I enthusiastically recommend THE BADENWEILER WALTZ. You will not be disappointed.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
The Badenweiler Waltz May 26, 2009
By CHRISTI
Loved the book from beginning to the end. I almost not believe that a male wrote the book. The autor has an ability to slip into a woman's mind - his main character is described with kindness and compassion. I grew up in Switzerland and know Germany well. His describtion of the places are so vivide you fell like you can step right into the story. I enjoyed his little excursions in to the traditions of Germany - you want to go on a wine tasting instantly!
Can't wait to read more and eagerly wait for the next book.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Refreshing novel Nov 26, 2008
By James Prothero
"English Prof"
Elizabeth Kurz is an English teacher from Covina, a failed writer, tired, defeated and on top of everything else, she has contracted a fatal lung disease. As G.W. Kroeker's The Badenweiler Waltz opens up, she has arrived at the German spa town of Badenweiler for no more reason that she couldn't bear to curl up and die in Covina, and two of her favorite writers, Anton Chekhov and Stephen Crane, both died there. She arrives and almost leaves again. But what she quickly discovers is that living and death are spiritual and psychological categories as much as they are biological. Befriending an older woman, Alice, and finding a kind and competent doctor, Elizabeth Kurz, who came to Badenweiler to die, finds that, after teaching more than twenty years in a Covina high school, she is for the first time in her life beginning to live. Her friend, Alice, recounting her husband's death, sums up her experience,
I was . . . just as good as dead myself. And then one morning when I woke up things were different--no, not things. I guess I was different. . . . Every morning since has been a gift, and every day. . . . A gift. . . . The trick is not in the dying, dear. We all die. Every last one of us. The trick is in the living. Not everyone accepts the gift, I'm afraid. For a whole year I was dead, along with Charles, dead to the world around me. And then one glorious morning I was resurrected. I reached out and accepted the gift, and once again became a participant in the dance of life.
For Elizabeth the challenge is to learn the dance of life. At her side to help her are the friendly hotel keeper, Herr Becker, her friend Alice and Dr Rainer Hoffmann. Confronting her is a rapacious and womanizing orchestra conductor, Herr Grossmann, and her real and most formidable foe, her past and her track record of surrendering ungracefully to every challenge held up to her.
How Elizabeth learns to live until she dies is the heart of the story. Kroeker could have handled it several ways: perhaps a nihilistic sort of angst novel where she goes off in the end and successfully destroys herself. Or he could have gone the Romance road and made it a love story and lose any sense the reader has that the story addresses the real problem of living life. What's wonderful about this novel is that Kroeker avoids both those easy and well-trod roads and writes the sort of novel that usually you have to go back to the nineteenth century to find done well: the novel that neither despairs of life and sees everything as chaos, like so many twentieth century novels do, nor makes it an unbelievable dream. This is a rare, balanced novel, of the kind To Kill a Mockingbird was. Elizabeth in fact does have some romance, and is quite nearly raped, so the darker and lighter elements are there. But neither event is the center of the book. The center is how she lives from moment to moment, and her late in life discovery of a new world she would have never known without having a terminal disease. It holds these ironies in steady balance in a way that reminds me of Under the Tuscan Sun. Kroeker also layers the story by including the short stories in full text that Elizabeth wrote in her abortive attempt to be a writer in an MFA program in Oregon many years back. The inset stories become fictions within fiction of the failure of Elizabeth's early life and her inability to engage the task of living in any meaningful way until lung disease forced her out of a dull existence in a high school classroom. Kroeker, a retired English teacher himself and former board member of SCTE, does this well, though the classroom is far in the background. Still, Elizabeth, like a lot of English teachers, can't help but remember quotes from great literature as she goes through her life, and these are delightful. I couldn't help but be pleased that the final protestation of love is couched in words straight from Mr Darcy. It all elevates the irony that vibrant life is in the literature and one can immerse oneself in it and still miss out on living, plodding through a teaching assignment lifelessly. Matthew Arnold said that "poetry is the criticism of life", poetry meant in the broader sense for which we now use the word literature. Elizabeth Kurz goes through life teaching life and literature in a sleepwalking state until death threatens and she awakens in Germany. I loved this book and can recommend it without the slightest reservation. It gives me hope that perhaps, the long Postmodern blight in literature is over and we can get on with writing real books.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Worth a dance Jul 26, 2008
By W. S. Brown
I found The Badenweiler Waltz an enjoyable and moving story. While reading the book, the quote at the beginning of the book - "If I am to be a fool, let me be a dancing fool." - kept running through my mind, so clearly framing the story. G. W. Kroeker's heroine Elizabeth had led a useful life, but without ever stepping out of the inertia of her self-imposed restricted world and taking the risk of pursuing her dream of becoming a writer ... without venturing forth, taking some significant risks, and dancing. The result was a challenging yet hopeful story. A particularly interesting aspect of The Badenweiler Waltz was the short stories within the novel that revealed the inner reasons for her self-restricted life. Here the main character becomes the author, and we get to look more deeply into all that had, prior to Badenweiler, kept her from dancing. These stories-within-the-story gave psychological depth to the theme of the risks of change. However, this hopeful story was also colored with the dark tones of terminal illness. This aspect was all the more moving after reading the forward and getting a peek at what seemed to have been a similar sort of beautifully meaningful tragedy in the sickness and death of Monika, the author's wife. There were many other things to like about this book: the account of a significant friendship, the greater compassion and healing to be found in whole-person medicine, the interaction of German and American cultures, the little bits of German dialogue, and simply very good story-telling. For me, this dance was definitely worth the venture.
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