Microreview: Life and Death in the Third Reich

Life and Death in the Third Reich
Peter Fritzsche
The Belknap Press of Harvard University

At the beginning of Ernst Junger’s Auf der Marmorklippen (“Off the Marble Cliffs”), there is a touching passage: “You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles.” Junger wrote in 1939, when no German could mistake (or simply ignore) the changes taking place in the country. Hitler came to power in 1933; the Nuremberg race laws were passed in 1935; the Anschluss took place in 1938. A dark new age was dawning, and Peter Fritzsche, the author of the definitive Germans into Nazis, probes his subject further in this brief, brutally intense new book, Life and Death in the Third Reich.

Fritzsche investigates the myriad ways Hitler’s Nazi Party attempted to impose the myth of its own necessity on the German people – and the correspondingly large number of ways the German people accommodated, accepted, and maybe even came to believe that myth (at the center of the book’s dust jacket is a kind-faced matronly woman who could be anybody’s friendly mother – only her right arm is raised, as are the right arms of all around her, in an enthusiastic Sieg Heil salute). It’s murky, disturbing territory, and Fritzsche, in chilling detail after detail, doesn’t flinch from it:

It was important, Elizabeth Sextrohs wrote [to her former friend Paula Tobias, a Jewish physician who’d asked her why she, Paula, no longer “counted” as a German] in September 1933, trying to be “as clear as possible,” to push back the “preponderant influence of Jewry in all aspects of German life.” True, it was “hard and tragic” for individuals to suffer. Elizabeth Gebensleben also weighed good and bad, but defended Jewish measures because they promised to restore German sovereignty. Antisemitism was tried on, and it often fitted.

Everywhere in Life and Death in the Third Reich, Fritzsche is energetic and assured, but he’s at his most affecting in this book when he’s writing about the Reich’s primary victims, the Jews:

The annihilation of Jewish communities was accompanied by the destruction of photographs, letters, and diaries – the private papers of deportees fueled a constant fire in Austerlitz, a satellite camp of Drancy (near Paris) where Jewish prisoners sorted through stolen goods – and thus the destruction of evidence of adjustment, attempts to escape or to resist the invaders, of the documentation of crimes, and of the comfort offered to friends and family.

Fritzsche has devoted his professional life to studying the horrible phenomenon of Nazism – how it came about, how it was able to flourish, how it exacted all the prices it did in death, in flesh, and in belief. It’s an unsavory subject, but he’s a master of it, and Life and Death in the Third Reich is his best work to date.

Microreview: A Summer Affair

A Summer Affair
by Elin Hilderbrand
Little, Brown and Company, 2008

There’s an element of confession in calling something a “beach book.” The description carries with it a host of associations, none of them having anything to do with literature; “beach books” get shoved in shoulder bags, daubed in suntan lotion, gritted with sand. And more: “beach books” are light escapist fair and thus cannot be considered good..

Gilbert and Sullivan would be furious: it takes a great deal of real talent to create and enjoyably light entertainment. Because the spell is so much more delicate than in a “serious” work of literature, there’s that much more that can ruin it. Most “serious” authors couldn’t pull it off if their lives depended on it.
It’s thus a pleasure to recommend Elin Hilderbrand’s A Summer Affair, due this July just in time for the dog days of summer. The story takes place on the storybook island of Nantucket, and it centers around the effortlessly likeable Claire Danner, responsible wife and mother and friend, who’s been asked by a local charity to convince her high school sweetheart, present-day mega-rockstar Max West, to perform at the charity’s upcoming Summer Gala. Over the objections of some of the island’s stodgier residents:

“Max West is a rock star. His songs are loud, and some of them have an edge. Do we really want our elegant evening to end with screaming guitar?”

The bulk of the book is the increasingly frantic ramp-up to the Gala, and Hilderbrand handles this familiar kind of plot with a deft, light touch just perfect for somebody the reader who spent the previous winter grappling with the new translation of Tolstoy (or even with outrageous heating bills). As Max arrives on the island and becomes a part of Claire’s life again, old passions threaten to re-ignite. Readers who’ve come to love Claire’s idiosyncratic kids and well-meaning husband will find it harder and harder to stop reading, wondering if Claire is bored enough with her life to throw away everything for a summer affair.

There’s salt spray and seagull cries at the back of this pleasant diversion of a book. Stuff it in your bag, and go with a blessing. Tolstoy can wait.

–Steve Donoghue

Microreview: Peace

Peace
By Richard Bausch
Alfred A. Knopf, 2008

Richard Bausch is a professional fiction writer—he writes novels and stories and he teaches both—so it was inevitable that at some point he would find a World War II story to tell (books about troubled teenagers and, in the course of time, about old men having affairs with young women will surely prove as inescapable). Peace is this story, a slim and nervewracking novel that does justice to its mighty era by setting its focus on one harrowing sliver of time within it.

Peace is set in Italy, somewhere near Monte Cassino, in 1943, after the Italians have capitulated and the Nazis have occupied the country and are staging a protracted retreat through the mountains designed to inflict as much carnage as possible upon the advancing Allies. Robert Marson is at the center of the novel, a corporal who leads two other American soldiers and one potentially untrustworthy Italian guide on a dangerous reconnaissance beyond the front line. Injury, awful weather, the specter of past disasters, and the omnipresent threat of snipers beset the men, and Bausch is best when evoking the grinding fear and uncertainty that hover over every action they take:

The dark was nearly complete. The possibility existed that the sniper had moved beyond this little square of ground, and so it was necessary to try watching in all directions. Marson turned slowly, looking through the almost useless scope. The sense that the sniper may have got by him fed his terror. And it was terror: a deep, black, nerve-tic distress so pervasive that it was hardly aware of itself. Marson stared out at the night in a freezing, fixed gaze of expectation. The darkness yielded no sound. The wind had died. The air grew colder all the time. The line of trees, left and right, the open lane, all of it seemed to be fading out of existence as light left the sky.

Bausch is a skilled and sensitive writer, though not an exceptionally talented one, so there is a certain indeterminacy in the characterizations and events of Peace that prevent it from providing either the emotional whiplash of William Wharton’s great novel A Midnight Clear or the profound, elegiac beauty of William Woodruff’s work of creative nonfiction Vessel of Sadness (also set around Monte Cassino). Still, this is a worthy, humane novel that is always attuned to the moral as well as physical terrain of the war. The likeable Robert Marson is nearly overwhelmed by despair, but his heroism lies in accepting despair as his lot, because the only alternative is numbness, soullessness: his tragedy Bausch displays admirably.

–Sam Sacks

Never-”Netherland”

You can well imagine my surprise when I was leafing through the 26 May issue of the New Yorker and came across a long, glowingly laudatory review of Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Netherland. I squawked a reedy ‘balderdash!’ (that’s ‘OMG’ to all you gen-XYZers out there) over my daal ki kachauri when I saw that the piece’s author was James Wood, normally as perceptive and even-keeled a critic as can be found in the length and breadth of Christendom. Disbelief mixed with indigestion as I read on, hoping the whole thing was a Cyril Connolly-style piece of artifice, designed to condemn while seeming to praise.

But no. “Exquisitely written,” Wood calls it, and he’s only getting started: “a large fictional achievement,” “one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read,” and a smattering of Fitzgerald comparisons … my plate of volcanically spiced food might as well have been ash.

Wood has seldom disappointed me in the past, but here he’s completely, hopelessly, cataclysmically wrong, as, inexplicably, other critics have been of this porously fractured, miserably overwritten trifle of a book.  He writes:

I don’t know whether Joseph O’Neill jumped out of his bath in Manhattan shrieking ‘Eureka!’ when he realized that, of all the possible subjects in the world, he had to write a novel about playing cricket in New York City, but he should have.

Well, maybe so – but then he should have poured himself a cup of coffee, had himself a good morning crap, and then forgotten all about it. No matter how you lard it with illusions of international brotherhood, the subject is hopelessly whimsical, like basing 200-something pages on the fact that hey! most barbers don’t cut their own hair! Instead, he not only went forward with his eureka moment, but he grafted it onto the tragic events of 9/11 in such a shameless and manipulative way that a lesser Fitzgerald would have blanched at the mere thought of it.

Still, a critic of Wood’s caliber demands we reconsider things, so I looked at the Netherland quotes he himself provides – and saw, alas, the full horror of the novel staring back at me. Here’s a bit Wood singles out for notice:

The low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistani-run lumberyard.

Alas indeed. Any critical reader (from whose ranks Wood temporarily absents himself with this ill-advised piece of his, but I for one hope for his speedy return) will get to the end of that horrendously wandering, half-bakedly starry-eyed passage and think one thing: I ask you, who double-parks in front of all these places? A supermarket? A funeral home? A synagogue, you should be so lucky?  It isn’t nit-picking: it’s pointing out the obvious: in his hurry to get on to the illusion of cricket-inspired TV-watching as a glue that holds mortal enemies together, O’Neill has simply forgotten his opening conceit involving double-parking. This is sloppy writing, of a type Wood himself would ordinarily be the first to scourge, and it lives in every comparable passage of Netherland, quoted by Wood or otherwise.

So we’re all perhaps witnessing the birth of one of those tidal critical movements that will propel this book to literary heights, for whatever subterranean (and talent-unrelated) reasons, and Wood will be a big part of it. He’ll be embarrassed about it someday, as, for instance, all erstwhile devotees of the shrug were, but it scarcely mitigates the present reality, to which you all might need reminder: Netherland stinks. Don’t bother giving it any of your time.

                                                                                                                                 –Steve Donoghue

Microreview: Netherland

Netherland
Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon Books, 2008

One thing should be clarified right at the start: Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Netherland is not a 9/11 novel – it’s a cricket novel onto which the events of September 11 have been tacked like a ‘wet paint’ sign. It’s true that the book’s main character, a banker called Hans who’s originally from the Netherlands, is displaced by those events – he and his wife and son temporarily relocate to the Chelsea Hotel – but for all the resonance or significance involved, it might just as well have been an undigested bit of bacon that prompted their flight. The point is to somehow get Hans to the wacky Chelsea Hotel with all its wacky denizens (and to get him there alone – the wife and son promptly decamp to their London home and leave behind not so much as a bubble-pop to mark their passing)(that chunk of the novel – and the novel is all chunks and no stew – is clearly a remnant of an earlier ‘family-displaced-by-9/11’ story in which O’Neill lost interest … although not enough interest was lost to move him to excise it from the finished product), whereby he can be introduced to the ‘netherland’ of New York’s outer boroughs and, through the intercession of Chuck Ramkissoon, an expat Trinidadian whose picaresque tale is a chunk of yet another book, learn all about cricket.

The ghoulish 9/11-opportunism of all this might go down a little smoother if it were mixed with mellifluous prose, but such is never the case in Netherland, where at every opportunity O’Neill stultifies. See if you can spot the pattern:

I felt shame – I see this clearly, now – at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.

That particularly sophomoric brand of rhetorical box-stacking isn’t the only Jamesian misfire on hand. Everywhere, vocabulary lessons are made to stand in for genuine people feeling genuine things:

At least twice a day I peered through the French windows and inspected the dirty, faintly glowing accumulation of ice. I was torn between a ridiculous loathing of [sic] this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid’s battle against the forces of liquefaction.

Solids looking for a smart, cohesive cricket novel – to say nothing of a 9/11 novel – should probably peer elsewhere.

– Steve Donoghue

Microreview: New Lives for Old

New Lives for Old
by Roger Kershaw and Janet Sacks
The National Archives, 2008

Pity the poor in any empire. In every era, as the amassed money of a state allows it to increase its modernization (and, lately, its industrialization), it will do so at the expense of those who cannot make accommodation with the new forces in their midst: the poor, the sick and mad, immigrants. A growing network of roads, aqueducts, mass-production farms … a growing network of anything will require land, room, and right of way, and this inevitably boils the poor like grease out of bacon.

The Victorian empire was no different, and its growth was railroads, which dispossessed thousands of farmers and tenants, crowding them into tenements and slums where there was little food, less sanitation, and no hope. And the most wretched in these wretched places were the children, denied the happiness that should be every child’s birthright.

Small wonder then that charitable organizations in the 1830s and 1840s in London began plucking some of these poor children from their squalid lives and shipping them off to the far corners of the empire, in the hopes that they might find the better life that was certainly not waiting for them in an East End tenement. It’s a fascinating story, and Kershaw and Sacks tell it well in this compact, groundbreaking book, citing rosy progress reports like this:

Louisa J. (14). Rescued from a wretched home. Mother has been one of the vilest characters on the streets of East London … this girl and her younger sister had already had their young lives scorched, and were veritably ‘saved so as by fire.’ Is now doing well in the family of a Methodist Minister, and writes now and again bright little letters to her unhappy mother.

The children’s fates were not always so happy – often they traded one wretched existence for another, put to work in factories and on farms from Canada to Australia in conditions sometimes little better than slavery. Kershaw and Sacks’ book is another amazing product from the National Archives, lush with rare photos and accounts in the children’s own words. No student of empire should miss it.

–Steve Donoghue

webgems, a partial list …

… we’ve been partial to:

some ruminations from Bud Parr about a subject always of interest to Open Letters, what are the hallmarks of good and bad reviews;

and on the same wavelength, some ruminations about the highs and lows of contemporary literary scholarship at The Reading Experience;

a recommendation re: Anthony Burgess at Salon eds refusés: “Read him, read him again”;

Garth Risk Hallberg rhapsodizes (in chorus with PEN World readers) about Robert Walser;

another packed issue from Vibrant Gray;

some eerie flags (but true) at Brazilian Artists dot net;

our Poetry Editor has published some woodsy fiction at Ghoti;

Smith is parlaying its now-trademarked Six Word Memoir success into a handful of new books—and they want your contributions!

a link to get us banned in fundamentalists circles;

all of John Berger’s landmark Ways of Seeing has arrived online;

And an all new, long-awaited Teen Girl Squad from Homestarrunner.com.

Microreview: The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics

The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics
ed. Peter Normanton
Running Press, $17.95

First, jealousy: oh to be the editor of such a tome, to be sent into whatever vaults (of horror) that contain the thousands of acid-eaten comic books from which these “best” stories were drawn. Then, after just the fifth unsatisfying Poe or Lovecraft rip-off, pity. I pity Mr. Normanton.For all the glory that’s been bestowed upon the golden age of horror comics, before the notorious code that all but sealed the crypts, tombs, chambers, and dens of terror (that is, the Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring measure instituted in 1954 in response to social pressure and to prevent possible government interference), most of those stories don’t age well, and by that I mean once you’re fourteen, the lack of depth and predictability begin to wear thin. Fortunately, the anthology covers post-code decades, and it’s among these decades that downright good stories are occasionally found, stories that use the form adeptly, and that don’t rely on shock tactics or twist endings, but rather leave the reader with the implication of something more—and wrong.

Most disappointing is the last chapter, “A New Millennium for the Macabre.” There are excellent horror comics being written today, but none are represented here (if you’re interested, read The Walking Dead or any of Mike Mignola’s output, for starters).

What is absent from this anthology is notable. The editor was not able to include any E.C. comics, nor the Warren horror titles of the 60s and 70s, nor Marvel, or D.C. An interesting restriction, that leads to the inclusion of some wonderful minor titles—Twisted Tales, from P.C., for example. However, no explanation is given for other exclusions, such as Gore Shriek, a strong horror comic from the 1980s. I suspect there are many such exclusions.

Steve Niles, who gets top billing on the front cover of the book, and who is lauded by many as the best scripter of horror comics working today (he wrote 30 Days of Night), but who is, in fact, very mediocre, if not downright bad, is revealed here by the poor black and white treatment the whole anthology gets. Ben Templesmith’s striking, painted panels can’t make up for Niles’ lack here. Black and White should be fine for most of the stories included, but too often it’s faded where it should be sharp.

Normanton could have made up for the failings of the comics themselves by writing more about them. His introduction to the book and his notes throughout are thin, either pointing out what can plainly be seen or tending toward nostalgia. Perhaps this is pandering to a perceived audience; if so, for shame. All together a missed opportunity, a footnote for fans of little other value.

— Adam Golaski

Microreview: Blind Fall

Blind Fall
by Christopher Rice
Scribner, 2008

We’ve encountered the specter of nepotism before on the Open Letters blog, and it hasn’t necessarily been such a bad thing. The accomplished third-tier writers of the past have to do something with their patrimonies, after all, and talent sometimes actually does roll downhill.Christopher Rice is of course the son of bestselling novelist Anne Rice, whose vampire novels (impressively gothic in Interview with the Vampire and even more impressively post-gothic in The Vampire Lestat, plus all the others) have set sales records world-wide. All Rice fils would have needed to do to guarantee himself royalty checks for the rest of a very, very long life would have been to even imply the presence of a vampire in even one of his novels, so the guy deserves some credit: he hasn’t done that or anything like it.:

Instead, his novels have been about the decidedly human variety of monsters that populate the mortal world: users, posers, manipulators, and the purely psychic vampires. And where his famous mother’s dialogue and plotting were unapologetically purple, young Christopher has aims towards more verisimilitude.

Blind Fall concerns the Iraq War and young veteran John Houck, whose investigation into the death of a former brother in arms leads him into a thriller-plot involving all levels of the U.S. military, which Rice has researched as extensively as life and limb would permit. The result is a military-thriller unlike anything Rice’s celebrated mother could have produced – but also, and equally importantly, unlike anything he himself has produced ‘til now. There’s an edge to the dialogue that wants to be raw and adult:

For what felt like an eternity, he rocked back and forth, as if it would help the pain to subside. Then, when he had managed to steady his breathing, he felt the gun barrel brush against the back of his head, and in a clear and controlled voice Alex said, ‘Did you ever stop to ask yourself why I never suspected you, John? Did you ever wonder why I didn’t think you killed him? After all, you were the only one who ever got to be alone with him after he was dead. Maybe chasing me out into the woods the way you did was some big cover.’
‘You know that’s not true.’
‘How did I know that, John?’
‘Because when I caught up with you, I would have killed you.’

Christopher Rice is a good-looking, amiable, and unpretentious young man who, in his writing, wants nothing more than ‘to keep you turning pages,’ as he’s said in many interviews. In Blind Fall he certainly succeeds in that modest aim. We’ll see how long it suits him.

–Steve Donoghue

“Briefly” Pointless

Sarah Hall’s new novel Daughters of the North is bestowed a four-sentence review in this week’s “Briefly Noted” section of The New Yorker, a review that does nothing at all except again raise the question of why New Yorker editors persist with this entirely useless feature. Does it exist simply to justify publishing houses in sending the magazine review copies? As busywork for some thankless intern? Is there any good reason that, instead of four unrevealing 150-word squibs, there shouldn’t be one 600-word review of some substance, credited to an actual person?

The editorial wisdom certainly isn’t related to the best interests of the reader, because these squibs are invariably mechanically impersonal and unenlightening (which is not to say that short reviews can’t be worthwhile—Time Out New York, for instance, packs in wonderful humor and charisma in each of its capsule reviews, and Open Letters’ own “Microreviews” are becoming a standard for the form). Here’s what’s written about Daughters of the North, in its entirety:

In Hall’s unsettling third novel, a series of ecological and geopolitical disasters in Britain has caused all citizens to be herded into urban centers, where women are fitted with contraceptive coils. Hall’s work covers familiar fictive ground in imagining a dystopia in which women’s bodies have become the battleground for competing ideologies; what is new here, however, is the unflinching focus on physical control. This can make for squeamish reading, as bodies are continually being “stretched and scoured” in the most vivid terms, but the result is a powerful argument that, when civil institutions, or the bodies of the state, are compromised, so, too, is the integrity of the body. The book sometimes lacks suspense, owing, in part, to the limitations imposed by its framing device, a transcript of a prisoner’s statement.

And…? we can only ask in response. Luckily, there’s ample elaboration to be found in A.I. White’s gregarious and in-depth review of Daughters of the North from Open Letters’ April issue. Head on over and discover if the novel is more than an “argument,” and has more going on in it than “scouring.”

–Sam Sacks