THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

by Thomas Wiseman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 1968

Strangely this novelist has allowed his fictional narrator to fall into the twin traps of autobiography--going on for too long and failing to recognize or feature the best part of a life story. The critical difference is that autobiographers are indulged where novelists aren't. On a business trip to present day Vienna, the morose and middle-aged Kasakh begins telling of his life there before and during the Nazi regime. So, right from the start readers know, with a concomitant loss of suspense, that here was one Jew who got away. Kasakh not only survived himself, he arranged for other Jews to be released from concentration-camps; since he was essential to a nutty top Nazi s inner serenity (SS Gruppenfuhrer Ludenscheid could not move his bowels without Kasakh's hypnosis). The potential for ironic comment or satire implicit in Kasakh's strange bargain with the constipated commander is bypassed and the interlude buried in a stock plot peopled by types marching through 443 pages to their foregone conclusions. Kasakh, in irritatingly interrupted flashbacks, concentrates instead on the story of Wirtof, his temperamental and social opposite, whom he first met in boyhood. Scion of an Austrian officer-caste family, monied, egoistic to an extreme, ambitious, and with a social code rather than an ethical sense--Wirtof is the wheeler-dealer readers have met often, along with his nymphomaniacal mistress, her complacent Jewish financier husband and his inbred immediate family. Wirtof of course finds out too late that he can't play the Nazi game and win. Too bad. Something different smothered in stale, ersatz trappings.

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION