Exile: The Lives and Hopes of Werner Pelz by Roger Averill

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Roger Averill’s Exile is an intelligent and deeply felt memoir of a friend and a friendship with his teacher, Werner Pelz. This book seems the perfect vessel for carrying a remarkable, if not famous, modern life out of its crowded privacy and gently into history; it is a kind of travel memoir in search of the life Pelz kept hidden inside the life of the mind he shared so courageously and freely with his readers, students, friends and loved ones.

This book deserves notice — not to mention a wide readership — as much for the beauty, elegance and tenderness of its writing, as for the lives (Pelz’s and Averill’s chief among them) and ideas it explores with such discernment and love. It is a new kind of nonfiction: personable, but never merely personal; scholarly, but never merely academic. Though it wanders wide, and sometimes almost loses its way, it never loses its voice. Exile is a testimony to a good life and a beautiful friendship.