→ July 8, 2019
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The Periodic Table.

Primo Levi’s short story novel The Periodic Table is a strange, interesting, maybe convoluted book, with each chapter built around a single chemical element that usually figures into the story, with Levi’s life from childhood through the Holocaust and afterwards as the book’s through-line. It made the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, and in 2006 the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever written, for which it beat out The Selfish Gene, Double Helix, and Gödel, Escher, Bach, among other titles. It’s also an arduous read, not for the content around Levi’s time in Auschwitz but for his disconnected writing style and prose that is often a difficult slog. I’m also fairly certain there’s some metaphor in here I missed, perhaps because I found his prose so prolix that I couldn’t read the book on two levels at the same time.

The Periodic Table is an autobiographical collection for Levi, a professional chemist who survived World War II in part due to his chemistry skills (and due to some good fortune, like falling ill before the death march out of Auschwitz that killed many surviving prisoners of the Nazis). Two of the stories (“Lead” and “Mercury”) are straight fiction, but the remainder tell some stories from Levi’s life before and during the war, although a few others read like fables rather than renderings of real life.

The two fictional tales and some of the fabulist stories, like “Arsenic,” in which the narrator is asked to examine a sample of sugar that might be tainted, are much easier to follow in prose and story – Levi lets loose, so to speak, and writes more like a fiction writer than a scientist. Some of the earliest stories about his life prior to the Fascist takeover of Italy and his eventual imprisonment are among the slowest to read, with the elements in question also less directly related to the actual story … but when the Nazis arrive, Levi becomes a bit of a different writer too, working with the natural tension that comes from having a murderous regime in charge, with its agents unpredictable and violent. The stark “Cerium,” named for a rare earth element about which Levi knows little other than its use in the flints found in lighters, is set inside the Lager (Auschwitz), where he and a comrade Alberto steal supplies of cerium so they can trade them for rations to survive, making the grim calculus of X flints for Y more days of life.

Levi survives the war, of course, while many of his friends and colleagues did not. The chapters after the liberation skip over some of his worst experiences in the hands of the Russians, but detail his attempts to reintegrate into the greater science world. “Vanadium” has Levi trying to locate an old nemesis decades after their last meeting. “Silver” is a bit of a science mystery, as Levi has to figure out why certain photographic plates are arriving with flaws from their factory. The final story, “Carbon,” is the most literary of all, a fanciful, beautiful meditation on the arc of a carbon atom over the millennia, going from somewhere in rock and earth to forming part of an actual life and back again, a testament to the impermanence of our existence and the survival of the building blocks of the universe beyond ourselves. But I exited the book with the sense that I didn’t fully appreciate what Levi tried to express; it could be the translation, of course, but I think Levi was such an erudite and precise writer that he often sacrificed clarity to find just the right word or phrase, which meant I spent more time trying to follow the literal plot when there was probably a greater layer of meaning I missed.

Next up: Still reading John Berger’s G..

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→ September 16, 2016
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HHhH.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the 3D building game Saloon Tycoon, and I wrote a piece for Insiders yesterday on some top 100 prospects who had down years. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Laurent Binet’s historical novel HHhH won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, an award given to the best debut novel in French literature, in 2010, and has since become a bestseller in multiple languages and even spawned a film version due out in 2017. But it’s far from a typical historical novel; while the novel’s core is the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “Blond Beast” of Hitler’s regime and a primary architect of the Holocaust, Binet has wrapped that story up in his own metafictional account of the author’s difficulty in writing a novel about the past where the participants are dead.

The Heydrich storyline is fairly simple, and Binet – or, I suppose, the narrator-author within the book – tells it with sufficient detail to inform the reader and keep the plot moving. Heydrich was born into privilege but was dogged by rumors as a youth that he was part Jewish; as a teenager, he joined a volunteer paramilitary unit and an anti-Semitic organization that was a major forerunner of the Nazi Party. He joined the Germany Navy in 1922 and was rapidly promoted through the ranks; he later married a woman who was already an ardent Nazi, but the affair cost him his officer status and he was briefly unemployed. A bit of good fortune put him in front of Heinrich Himmler, who named him head of the newly created intelligence service within the SS, a post that led to another surge up the ranks for Heydrich, culminating in his roles as director of the Gestapo and as Acting Protector of the occupied area now known as Czechia. It was there that Heydrich became the lone high-ranking Nazi official to be assassinated by resistance forces, the result of a courageous and clumsy operation called Anthropoid that resulted in Heydrich’s death, a showdown where the assassins were trapped in a Prague church after a lengthy manhunt, and the Nazi destruction of the towns of Lidice and Ležáky, with over 1300 civilians murdered.

Binet’s approach in HHhH – the title stands for “Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich,” which means “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich” – is to tell the story of the assassination while also telling the story of telling the story. He presents himself through this narrator surrogate as a writer somewhat obsessed with the historical facts, dwelling over the difficulty of recreating events through secondhand materials of questionable veracity, and often presenting a scene complete with dialogue only to tell us in the next section that he made it up.

On the one hand, Binet examines some real questions seldom asked of historical fiction and even non-fiction, not the least of which is how the author could possibly know what was said in the dialogue s/he presents. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable, as are our memories in general, so even asking participants who said what won’t produce accurate answers. On the other hand, it’s distracting as hell to get rolled up in the assassination storyline, only to have Binet’s narrator burst through the door with a “hold up, that’s not really what happened!” tangent that breaks the spell of the narrative. To be fair, that’s more prevalent in the first half of the book; once the story gets cooking, such as the scene when the assassins bumble the actual attempt (which, sorry for the spoiler, killed Heydrich anyway), the interruptions are fewer, and Binet saves some of his final thoughts on the author’s dilemma for the last few pages – a peroration that is as effective as any other passage in conveying his state of mind as an author who became invested in his story and frustrated by his inability to ever get it truly “right.” HHhH thus is more like two nested stories, the outer one of which is about the inner story, with differing styles and levels of interest in both of them, working well together but carrying some of the frustrating hallmarks of all postmodern literature.

Next up: I’m halfway through Clifford Simak’s Hugo winner Way Station.

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→ September 23, 2013
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Hanns and Rudolf.

I only became aware of Thomas Harding’s new book, Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz, because of Harding’s recent piece in the Washington Post about the Kommandant’s daughter, Brigitte, who still lives in northern Virginia. The book’s publisher reached out to me after I tweeted the link to the article and sent me a review copy, which I tore through this weekend because I couldn’t bear to put the book down.

The subtitle is a little misleading, as this book isn’t so much the story of a chase as it is a pair of contemporary portraits of two German men whose lives headed in opposite directions with the rise of the Third Reich, setting them on courses that end in one hunting down and capturing the other after the war’s conclusion. The chase itself isn’t long, so most of the book is spent getting us up to that point. Harding’s achievement here is making both biographies interesting enough that the reader is compelled to keep turning the pages – and in presenting Rudolf in a neutral fashion even though he’s one of the worst monsters in our species’ history.

That Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the man who oversaw the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz and devised the scheme where the pesticide Zyklon-B was used to exterminate Jews and other prisoners in huge numbers, with well over a million killed at the camp. Höss’ eventual devolution into a calm, apathetic architect of history’s most efficient mass producer of death starts from early childhood – including a fanatical father who died young and a lack of any close ties to family members – but also reveals a tremendous amount about the “just following orders” mentality of so many members of the SS, the Nazi Party, and of the German population as a whole. While running Auschwitz, Höss would return home each night to his villa just beyond the camp’s walls, where he lived with his wife and five children in a luxurious house staffed with slaves drawn from the prison.

Hanns, the hero of the story and the author’s great-uncle, is Hanns Alexander, a German Jew born into fortunate circumstances that would largely disappear before he fled to the UK with his family in 1936. Left without a state after the Nazi regime revoked their citizenship, Hanns chose to join the British army, which set up a separate unit for refugees seeking to fight their former countries that allowed them to serve in non-combat roles (because, you know, can’t trust ’em). After the war ended, Hanns became a private hunter of war criminals in his spare time, eventually parlaying that into a formal role that led him to recapture the puppet ruler of Luxembourg, Gustav Simon, and to earn a command to track down Höss himself. Hanns’ own drive to fight against Germany – more than fighting for Britain or the allies – derived from the personal injustice that he underwent when he and his family had to flee from the Nazis, as well as the more general sense of outrage from the massive crimes the German state and its people had committed against the Jews and other so-called enemies of the state.

Höss’ testimony played a pivotal role in the Nuremberg trials because of his willingness to admit his own role in the Holocaust and in the chain of command that made the mass murders possible, which means Hanns himself contributed to the convictions and executions of many of the surviving leaders of the Third Reich. Höss comes across as a weirdly complex character, a loving father and family man who beat down his rare compunctions over gassing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children because he refused to show weakness to his superiors or to those under his command. Did he do this for fear for his own safety in a regime where guards who showed mercy to prisoners would be beaten or killed? Or was he simply nursing his own desire for success and praise by trying to set an example of fanaticism that others would revere?

The conflict between Höss’ work and family selves, his apparent apathy toward his victims, and his unclear motivation for his actions at Auschwitz make him the far more compelling character than Alexander, whose life is much easier to understand. Hanns watched fellow Germans pull the rug out from under his comfortable life, and his personal fury combined with that from his moral compass to turn him into a rabid Nazi hunter, yet one who declined to discuss his role in capturing these criminals for most of the rest of his life. It’s a simple narrative for a man’s life, one that’s easy to fathom. Turning into a cockroach the way Höss did is a lot harder to understand, and it’s part of why I couldn’t avert my eyes from Hanns and Rudolf until he’d been hanged.

–

I’ve been busy plowing through more titles from the Bloomsbury 100 as well, but nothing that merited a long post here. Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, which draws parallels between the swift decline of a noble Austrian family and that of the Hapsburgs’ reign, heading into the disaster of World War I that led to the breakup of their sprawling, unwieldy empire. It dragged horribly, however, with Dickensian descriptions and an absurd amount of moralizing over peccadilloes that barely merit mention today.

Theodor Fontaine’s Effi Briest, named by Thomas Mann as one of the six most essential novels ever written, was a stronger read, even though the morality play also fails to resonate today. Based on a true story from the late 1800s, Effi Briest tells the title character’s tragic history from her arranged marriage to a man much her senior through her extramarital affair with the lothario Crampas to her divorce and fall from grace. It’s far more believable than the similar Madame Bovary and less prolix than Anna Karenina, two similarly-themed novels, working more along the lines of The Awakening, another novel of adultery where the plight of the woman in a male-dominated, moralistic society takes center stage.

Eugenie Grandet is the second Balzac novel I’ve read, along with Old Goriot, both part of his Human Comedy novel sequence. It’s another tragedy, this one the story of Eugenie’s miserly father and how his parsimony destroys his wife, himself, and, even after his death, his daughter, when even a small count of generosity would have saved them all. I’ve found Balzac’s prose to be his great strength – I enjoy his phrasing and descriptions yet never find them slow or monotonous – but the story in Eugenie Grandet had less of the dark comedy that made Old Goriot a better read.

Next up: Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

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→ May 3, 2009
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The Reader.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader – the basis for the film that starred Kate Winslet getting “repeatedly naked,” according to Bill Simmons – is an impressively complex work given its length, around 220 pages. It is nominally the story of Michael Berg, who is fifteen when the story opens, and Hannah Schmitz, who is more than twice that age; the two end up in an intense sexual relationship, one that echoes the relationship of Lolita but that is told from the younger participant’s perspective. (Of course, older man/younger girl is significantly more scandalous than older woman/younger guy, which further pushes this issue into the background.) Hannah breaks the relationship off suddenly, disappearing from Michael’s life without warning, only to reappear years later in a substantial coincidence as Michael finds himself assigned by a college class to cover a war-crimes trial in which Hannah is a participant. Michael realizes that he knows something about Hannah that would exonerate her of the worst of the charges – it won’t take you that long to figure it out – and his choices from that point forward dictate the course of the rest of Hannah’s life, much as her choices with him when they were lovers dictate the course of the rest of his life.

My theory of the book is that Schlink was not referring to Michael or Hannah with the title “The Reader,” but is referring to us. In the first part of the novel, he gives us the affair, one that despite Michael’s youth and a heavy reliance on sex with little conversation is not scandalous and is even presented positively. Hannah is mysterious and moody but appears to be hiding some secret pain. Michael is young and innocent but cares deeply for Hannah. There are a few hints of the age imbalance, but the net for Michael is give to us as positive. Schlink is just setting us up, however; the sympathetic characters of part one are not so sympathetic after all – Hannah was a guard in the SS and is accused of complicity, if not outright responsibility, in the deaths of hundreds of female Jewish prisoners; Michael, ruined emotionally by the teenage dalliance with Hannah, can’t take simple steps to help Hannah or simply make her life in prison a little better, much less offer her any sort of absolution for breaking off a relationship that, ultimately, was wrong. Did Michael have an obligation to come forward during Hannah’s trial with his exculpatory evidence – or to at least confront Hannah about it? Why would Hannah refuse to set aside her shame to avoid a horrible fate – did she want to go to prison, to seek absolution through the justice system because the dead could not absolve her? Hannah’s choices are particularly mysterious, since she rarely speaks to Michael when they’re together and has but a handful of lines of dialogue after part one. In a short novel, Schlink presents moral dilemmas while also challenging us to reconsider our loyalties to the two main characters. Why are those two sympathetic in part one, when ultimately, we know so little about them, and some of what we know is less flattering than we believed at first glance? Is the responsibility on the author to reveal everything at once, or on the reader to consider all possibilities before drawing conclusions or developing attachments to specific characters?

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