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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

One of the strangest books on the rise of Hitler

Hans Keilson's "The Death of the Adversary," first 50 pages or so, great start to an unusual and disturbing book. On first thought, it seems familiar territory - young man growing up as the Nazis take over Europe and Nazism and anti-Semitism spread like a plague - not that there can ever be enough documentary and artistic evidence of this horrible era, all who know of it should testify - but what makes t his book (so far) especially strange and chilling is that (so far) the words Nazi, Hitler, Jew, Germany never appear. The young man - actually an older narrator looking back on earlier events - slowly chronicles his observations as he observes his parents talking in whispers, burdened by distress, then at some point his friends won't allow him in their "games" and he comes home in tears, eventually gets back into a soccer game and is brutally fouled and injured, his life gradually forced more into a retreat - he has no understanding of why. It's a book of a terrifying historical movement and period, without a glimpse of actual history or current events, all told from the inside, from within a family and within a consciousness. Stranger still, the older man looking back is focusing on his death wish toward his enemy (or adversary, as the title would have it), whom he refers to only as B. - we assume this is Hitler, but why the B? Keilson iis I think a Dutch writer, perhaps still living, one of his books recently just published in English - a writer who should no doubt be much better known and more widely translated than he is.

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