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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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