Jim Shepard

I usually avoid novels set in the Holocaust because however good and well written they may be, they just destroy me. It's hard to spend intimate time with such evil... "evil", which seems too mundane a word here, really. This book is no different. Doctor Korczak certainly deserves to be immortalized in fiction, however. The book somewhat reminds me of Louis Malle's film "Au Revoir Les Enfants", in being a simply but not simple told unsentimental story about children and then - boom - the Holocaust just kicks you in the gut.

So... thanks, Tournament of Books, for leading me to read this. I guess.… (mer)

The stories of the holocaust have been recounted in at least a few different ways. I've found those with the most objective narrators, e.g. Primo Levi's If This is a Man, to be the most moving and most literarily satisfying. As humans, it's only necessary to be shown hell, we all have enough experience with nightmares to make any author's pathos superfluous. That is why horror stories are so universally appreciated. Mr. Shepard tells us an historical story that we already know in detail. He tells the story through the eyes of a boy who says, "Whether I was happy or unhappy, I took things as I found them.", and who is the target of psychological projection by everyone around him. His constantly complaining mother and his callous smuggler friends all, in a philosophically absurd fashion, accuse him of being self-centered. The overall effect is that we seem to have been given an honest vision of these events, and the result is devastating.… (mer)

In places very good, in places rambling and lacking direction. You can tell this book has been enlarged from a short story (Nosferatu in Love) but I don't think its been improved. The early years stuff is interesting, a fictionalised biography of an interesting man in interesting times. Then the Nosferatu in Love section, which is about what happens when you can't escape your past whilst making a groundbreaking silent film! It inspired me to rewatch Nosferatu for the first time in over 20 years, helping me to see things in the film I hadn't seen, and see stuff in the story that I would have missed. Then Nosferatu in Love is repeated twice more, against the backdrop of making other films that aren't quite as interesting. Then he dies. The End.… (mer)