[truttyMab]

Dabbler: nothing wrong with the content of the first paragraph. Most normal people like a bit of sex now and again (or all the time), as do abnormal people. But if the author is looking for a new "angle" to introduce the reader to the murder of Jews to sell his book, vying with the others waiting in the queue for glory with their second-hand HolocaustLit, he'll succeed in mesmerising those uninformed souls for whom the Holocaust / Shoah / Khurbn is just another bagful of historical facts created by History to give novelists something thrilling to write about.

Someone who is never at a loss for words, and starts lists of obscure ones to impress university stoodents doing literature degrees is dangerously near to the entrance to Pseuds Corner:

...the nucleic acids adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine swirl around in irreperable chaos, It is possible to maintain narrative tension (and the reader's interest) by occasionally and postmodernistically listing things from science, history and the like, but if the technique is overused, and interspersed with dozens of pages of unparagraphed sentences, you begin to get the impression that the author is manic, rather than a genius. Variety is the spice of literature. Although I was making a cocky pun when I said that Verhaeghen "pulls all the right levers" (one Swedish novel even has a protagonist called Jerker), I did mean to imply that, judging by Dabbler's review (which I have now re-read), the Belgian author is pandering to a new generation of innocents that know nothing about the Holocaust, and want too "ooh" and "aah" at the sheer well-distanced and surrogate horror of it all - as if it were Frankenstein or Dracula.

I find that what Dabbler says about 550 pages of historical background (i.e. things that Verhaeghen has nicked from other people's books), blent with 150 that move the plot forward, rather implies that the author props his edifice up too heavily with historical detail, in order to disguise the fact that beyond generating shock value, he has little to add to any psycho-historical examination of the Holocaust.

In summa: there's nowt wrong with an orgasm, but in the right place. And, in logical terms, Verhaeghen is rather equivocal as to whether the semen is resting in the dip of his navel, or is coursing uselessly down her sucking throat. Must have a lot to go round if there's enough "salad cream" for both receptacles.