[truttyMab]

It'll be interesting to see general reviewers' and critics' opinions on this book. It does indeed seem long.

Another long and recent Holocaust book, one that will soon hit British bookshops, is the translation of the American-Frenchman Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" (The Eumenides, The Kindly Ones), written in French.

See:

http://www.signandsight.com/features/976.html

and

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1665.html

Personally, I'm more inclined to read authors who themselves experienced Auschwitz, the SS, or life as a fugitive from the Nazis, etc., etc., such as Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Konwicki, Etty Hillesum, Avrom Sutzkever, and others.

I am rather sceptical of a younger generation of authors, mostly American, but also including the Dutchman Arnon Grunberg, who have created something of a derivative Holocaust literature, where rather comfortably off people, who have only read about the Holocaust in books, write a lot of material as a morbid kind of entertainment. This cheapens an examination of one of the most horrific episodes of the whole 20th century. Better to read history books, plus the memoirs and novels of those who were there.

As a translator myself of books written in Estonian, describing how the Russians also put people in cattle trucks and shipped them off to labour camps, I again want to read what people who experienced this have written, e.g. Jaan Kross, not what some young squirt knocks together into a bestseller. Kross was imprisoned for some months during the German occupation of Estonia (1941-44), then, when the Russians took over (1944-1991), he spent a total of eight years in labour camps and Siberian exile. Now there was a man who knew what he was talking about.

Does Dabbler think that the Verhaegen book rises above all this and adds something to Holocaust literature?