The Paper Man

Starred review from February 20, 2023
Irish author O’Callaghan (Life Sentences) brings to life 1930s Austria and 1980s Ireland in this mesmerizing tale of love, soccer, and family secrets. On the eve of Germany’s 1938 annexation of Austria, the latter’s national soccer team captain, Matthias Sindelar, is being surveilled by the Gestapo for mocking Hitler and his team’s German opponents on the field. Realizing he’s placed his Jewish lover, Rebekah, at risk, he persuades her to leave Vienna and join her cousins in Cork, Ireland. There, Rebekah discovers she is pregnant with Sindelar’s child. O’Callaghan then shifts to 1980 Cork, where Rebekah’s son, 41-year-old stevedore Jack Shine, finds stashed in his mother’s things a bundle of yellowed newspaper clippings about Sindelar and velvet-wrapped letters addressed to her and signed “S.” Jack is stunned; his mother, who died 30 years earlier, had never disclosed his father’s identity. With help from his father-in-law, Jack begins to trace his family history. There’s a natural realism to the Cork scenes, and a romanticizing of mid-1930s Vienna and its coffee houses, dance halls, and art exhibitions, which stands in aching contrast to the coming war and the couple’s separation. Even better is the action on the soccer pitch. With Sindelar’s team facing a sudden push from the Germans, they revert to “one-touching the play back and forth across the field, toying with their foe like picadors around a weary bull, lancing and weaving away, moving as wind moves.” O’Callaghan’s storytelling is magnetic.