A powerful book, literarily inventive and emotionally poignant.
An academic analyzing the possibly fantastical diary of a former SS officer struggles to come to grips with his own son’s death in Finch’s novel.
During the construction of the Mauthausen Memorial in Austria, a chocolate box containing the personal effects—including a diary—of an SS officer named Rikard Anton Boecker is unearthed. The unnamed protagonist and narrator of this mesmerizing novel, a university professor in Manchester, England, volunteers to read the diary and, as best as possible, determine its historical veracity, a difficult challenge given its nature as an “amalgam of fact and fiction.” The central story that emerges from the diary is astonishing: Boecker—who was born Martin Tauber but changed his name for reasons that only become hazily intelligible by the end of the novel—claims a vigilante named Karl Redlich brutally terrorized Nazis in Berlin, a profoundly implausible tale. The more deeply the protagonist considers the diary of the man whose “face wears a deathly seriousness,” the more he considers the author an unreliable narrator, maybe even psychologically disturbed. He wonders if the story is the fantasy of a “helpless bureaucrat” who could no longer bear his own moral complicity in Nazi crimes, a “revenge fantasy told by a man in no position to stop it.” The narrator, who comes to believe Tauber killed himself, wrestles with the suicide of his own son, Zach, a tragedy so heartrending it precipitated the collapse of his marriage to his wife, Ruth.
This is an eclectically structured novel—in addition the protagonist’s first-person narration, the text includes his synopsis of Tauber’s diary and the analysis of it he composed. This unique compositional style blurs the lines between the academic and the personal, between intellectual appraisal and emotional reaction, in a provocative and affecting dissolution of traditional binaries. Given the inexhaustibleness of Holocaust literature, one might think an original contribution to the genre is impossible, but Finch’s novel earns the distinction. The profile of Tauber that emerges—always slippery and impressionistic—is, whether real or imagined, tantalizingly complex. Tauber was not a fundamentally political man, and certainly not an enthusiastic disciple of Nazi ideology; the death of his wife Emilie, which may have been a suicide, seemed to impress upon him a moral clarity lost in what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.” The narrator of the story is equally multifaceted, an impressively cultured man with bottomless reserves of erudition stymied by a spiritual ennui. Tauber’s story is one he can move past, but it stirs something in him comparable to the way Emilie’s probable suicide awakened Tauber from his amoral slumber. “Zach was a different story, he was a lifelong tenant, sliding rent checks under my door without so much as a friendly reminder. In death, he was present in ways that he wasn’t in life, a perpetual shadow that danced inside my own.” Among the novel’s many virtues is Finch’s prose, which swings from the lucid rigor of analysis to haunting poetry.
A powerful book, literarily inventive and emotionally poignant.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9798990853171
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Alternative Book Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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