This serious effort to evoke the crucible of German fascism proves less effective at conveying emotional resonance.
The perspectives of perpetrators, victim, and bystanders evoke the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Noted New Zealand author Chidgey’s latest is a lengthy, well-researched addition to the already sizable shelf of Holocaust fiction. Dr. Lenard Weber is a Mischling, only part Jewish, but he ends up at Buchenwald, having been summoned there by Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn. Hahn’s role at the camp is administrative officer—overseeing budgets, plumbing, etc. The inmates are less than human to him but not so his wife, Greta, with whom he lives in a luxury villa. When Greta develops ovarian cancer, Dietrich will try any medical resource, which leads him to Weber, inventor of the Sympathetic Vitaliser, a machine designed to destroy cancerous tumors. Weber narrates his story in 1946, via letters written to his daughter, who's in the Theresienstadt ghetto; Dietrich’s account dates from the 1950s; Greta's "imaginary diary" takes her from 1943 to 1945; and a fourth narrative voice emanates from 1,000 citizens of Weimar, whose awareness of the vast camp nearby is filtered through propaganda, self-interest, and delusion. Packed with precise details about the camp, German culture, the Nazi machine, and much more, the novel offers a sober reflection on a country seized by dehumanizing insanity, corrupted by lies and cruelty. Yet the characterization is predictable, especially when it comes to Dietrich, a familiar blend of Aryan orderliness, contempt, and deception. Greta senses the abyss on her doorstep but averts her eyes. Weber is a sympathetic lens through which the worst of the suffering may be glimpsed. And the Weimar citizens embody denial, disgust, and disbelief. As the war wraps up, deliverance for one survivor contrasts with guiltless acceptance by the German community.
This serious effort to evoke the crucible of German fascism proves less effective at conveying emotional resonance.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60945-627-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
For connoisseurs of speculative fiction who enjoy detailed worldbuilding.
In the near future, the world is run by WellCorp but all is far from well.
Stephens’ debut begins in “Zone 874, Pacific Ocean, 29 Days Post-Launch,” where we find one of our two heroines, Maggie, alone and afloat in a vessel called a WellPod, which is about to serve her a so-called latte made of mushrooms and root vegetables. "When Maggie could see the brown sludge that coated the bottom of the mug, she placed it back on the coaster, triggering its descent into the table at the same time her gratitude journal slid out from a lower compartment.” A passion for worldbuilding continues to drive this story of Lenses, Devices, Injectibles, Pohvees, WellNests, EarDrums, and much, much more as we go landside and meet Maggie’s live-in partner, Noa, who works at WellCorp’s Malibu campus, where she and Maggie have been assigned a high-tech apartment. With wildfires, earthquakes, and drought having wiped out most of the rest of California, volunteering for a Pod voyage was Maggie’s only option for getting out of town—and she really needs a break to figure out what to do about her unexpected pregnancy. Oops. In chapters dated by number of days pre- and post-launch, a complicated story unfolds. One has to do with corporate malfeasance and whistleblowing at WellCorp—were the Pods really ready to launch, and is there a major storm underway? Others involve infidelities and betrayals both past and present. It’s hard to keep up with which scary threat you’re supposed to be worrying about and which characters you’re rooting for—and the constant explanations and exposition dry up the juice. The novel is happiest when preparing and serving futuristic meals. “The hatch of her NutriStation opened and Maggie reached inside for her plate. The diagram projected through her Lens mapped out the baked coconut bacon, sun-yellow cherry tomatoes cooked in lab-grown avocado oil and coated in ancient grains aside tempeh topped with a dollop of collagen- and protein-fortified macadamia nut labneh.” Sounds better than the latte, anyway.
For connoisseurs of speculative fiction who enjoy detailed worldbuilding.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781668034316
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real.
A troubled American family suffers an insuperable loss during a year abroad.
While Choi’s latest—a domestic drama with deep roots in 75 years of geopolitics—has little in common with her previous novel, the National Book Award–winning coming-of-age story Trust Exercise (2019), it does share one characteristic with that book: Only so much can be said about its explosively twisty plot without spoilers. What’s sort of amazing is that a novel with such a locomotive of a plot—and give it a chance, because it doesn’t rev up right away—could just as reasonably be described as character-driven, devoted to unfurling the personalities and destinies of its three point-of-view characters, Serk, Anne, and Louisa Kang. Serk is an ethnic Korean born in Japan; his family was among those thrust into chaos by the regime changes of the 1940s and he ends up moving on his own to the United States to purse an academic career. There he meets Anne, a white Midwesterner whose teenage fling with a married man resulted in the birth of a son she barely saw before he was taken away; 10 years later, her marriage to Serk produces a daughter, Louisa, who’s at the center of the storm that is this novel. Though she is never a happy or easy child, her life will go from merely bad to unbearable in the middle of fourth grade, when she’s forced to go to Japan for her father’s visiting professorship. While Serk and Louisa are walking by the sea one night, something happens. The girl is found half-dead on the beach with few clear memories, and her father has disappeared; it is concluded that he has drowned. Louisa and Anne have many more challenges over the decades ahead, including serious chronic illness for Anne and a nearly disastrous college trip to Europe for Louisa, but one thing they will never have is a real connection. This is not an easy novel, but it has important things to say, and Choi is a writer you can trust to make the journey worthwhile.
Never sentimental, never predictable, this aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780374616373
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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