[dodsCooggipsehome]

This is an incredible novel about the Shoah, written from the pov of a fighter of the resistance, who is caught, put on a train, interned in Buchenwald and lives to tell a tale. It is an unreliable narrator, who revises his versions of the truth, who battles both with memory loss and traumatic memories and the basic incapability of catching the horribleness that is the Shoah in words. Here there is no why. The language is simple, as the narrator reasons with himself, goes off on tangents and explains Marxism, but the structure is complex. What's real? What's not? And how do you speak about what cannot be spoken of easily? There are few descriptions of gruesomeness, few scenes from Buchenwald, yet THE HORROR is at the center of that intricate web of iterations of the same story, basically, the story of one man's struggle against the nazis, a struggle that continues into the present.

An incredible novel, highly, highly recommended to anyone who's interested in the topic.

[dodsCooggipsehome]

German, not very good, but informative, essay on the novel here