Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany’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’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—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. 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’s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters’ 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. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.

Love, denial or acceptance of a soul connection between two "inappropriate" people have always been subjected to a kind of test and most of the time the result was not the desired one. Life is built on dreams, reality and personal choices. We each have the power to change our future at every moment, things that seem trivial to us can change the course of our existence. We choose from a multitude of ways in which we want to live our lives, and when the end result does not satisfy us, we blame fate. We complicate ourselves in all kinds of compromises without realizing that time is not standing still and we wake up at the end of the road tired and full of frustrations because we realize that everything we lost on this route full of serpentines called life ... time, family, love, but especially one's own soul, are all irretrievable.