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December 13, 2005

2005 NOTABLES: GOTZ & MEYER

Gotz We were extremely interested in reading Serbian author David Albahari's novel Gotz and Meyer since we saw a March 2004 review in TLS which called it an "extraordinary and gravely moving novel."  The novel is now available in the US through Harcourt, and the story concerns itself with two noncommissioned SS officers whose assignment - "not a big one," but one that "requires efficiency" - is to transport five thousand Serbian concentration camp prisoners, one hundred at a time, in a hermetically sealed truck in which they are gassed.  The book takes the form of the narrator's lecture to his students, during which Albahari grapples with the costs of the robotic obedience that marked the Nazi assault on European Jewry.

As the TLS points out in its review (available to subscribers only):

Albahari's book does gain almost unbearable weight from the suggestion that the names Gotz and Meyer may have been those of real individuals (it is never quite confirmed). But it is enough to realize that two such men as these must have existed, been charged with doing everything described, and proceeded to carry out their orders. Details of what happened, where it happened, what kind of officials prescribed and executed it, were researched by the author himself.

Gotz and Meyer is evidence that the Holocaust continues to inspire a generation of European writers and, for all our assumed familiarity, new versions of the tale - in the case, the focus on the Serbian atrocities as the so-called "Fairgrounds" - continue to come to light.

Read an extract from the UK version of Gotz and Meyer.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Reviews |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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