The Mountain Clinic.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Walter Schwende lives with his father and mother in Scarborough, Ontario. In 1966, when Walter is seven, his father Franz leaves for work at the window manufacturing plant he owns and never returns. Walter tells his own story; Hoefle’s first person narrative follows the boy as he attempts to make some sense of his father’s disappearance. His search includes reading and interpreting the police “occurrence report.” Franz’s car was found abandoned at the banks of a river; the river was searched and no body found. That lack of definitive proof of his father’s death leads inexorably to the son’s journey that is as much internal as it is physical. “When you disappear,” Walter thinks, “for the longest time no-one knows you have. There’s only a quietness that grows in the person left behind, that fills the body with air. You have taken the other’s insides and replaced them with an airy nothing, a hollow.” His efforts to fill this hollow lead him to Vancouver, to the Northwest Territories where he works in a mining town, and to a farm in Nicaragua during the Contra wars. Walter finds his way to Montreal and a position as a college teacher where he tells his class to “jot down everything in your head right now about your father.”

Walter travels to Austria, his father’s birthplace, and is told by his uncle that his father, deep in debt and with his business failing, had, in fact, faked his own death and returned to the village of his birth. What follows from this discovery is a kind of recapitulation of Franz’s life, what Walter has been told of this life, what he has already imagined.

Hoefle’s writing works on several levels. Dialogue, settings, characters—all fit what becomes a kind of Jungian search for the father, which is, really, a search for important pieces of oneself.

Hoefle has written a strong, self-assured first novel. Recommended.