"Max Stone, born in Canada as the son of Austro-Jewish emigres, has been living peacefully in Vienna since the age of five, wanting only to be a "good Austrian." But one day in the mid-1980s, thirty-six years after taking up residence in the Austrian capital, Stone enters a tobacco shop and becomes the unwitting and unwilling target of an anti-Semitic remark. Stone's inability to react to this sentence subsequently splits his "good Austrian" identity in two, giving rise to a crisis that becomes both psychological and political, personal and national. With Stone suddenly and unexpectedly cast into the role of "Jewish fellow-citizen," Peter Henisch's novel reproduces the debates about Austria's democratic present and its fascist past. Far from an individual affliction, Stone's paranoia arises from and responds to the often contentious interactions between personal and national narratives, between individual and collective identities in modern Austria."
