<p>Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany&rsquo;s greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife&rsquo;s deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years&mdash;only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve.<br> <br> How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane&rsquo;s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters&rsquo; own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. <i>Irretrievable</i> is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.<br></p>