Disquieting and tender (also in the sense that a wound is tender).  With the voice of a strange, soft-spoken friend, Heinz Fritz tells of his childhood in a post-war Austrian town with his troubled Norwegian mother and of his vocation as an actor, beginning with imitation of her epilepsy and performances that embody the brutality of his environs in ways I will leave the future reader to discover.   The book is partly about Heinz’s lifelong, inconclusive search to understand his origins, the main clue being a Lebensborn itinerary.  But the novel seems to suggest that wholeness, insofar as it can exist for Heinz, is to be found not in piecing together the truth, but in the art of acting: reenactment as a way to subjectively merge with the other/mother, theater as a practice where memory fragments fit together with the written text like restored potsherds.