Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... The Chosen Ones (2014)by Steve Sem-Sandberg
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   MemorialeSardoShoah | May 22, 2020 |   ) Humila | Jun 22, 2015 |
 The story of Spiegelgrund remained little known until recently. In 2002, the last remains of children whose brains had been preserved in glass jars in the basement were buried in the Vienna cemetery. ... [Sem-Sandberg] writes that there is by now such an “extensive literature” on Spiegelgrund that it would take too long to refer to it. I would bet, however, that to most American readers the subject is new; a few guideposts would have been helpful. ... A question kept nagging at me as I plowed through the catalog of horrors recounted here: What is the gain for my pain? The author clearly wants to provoke pity and outrage in his readers, and he succeeds — but to that end, why not write a punchy reportage instead of a very long novel? In fact, two late chapters read like reportage, detailing the postwar trials of doctors and a nurse. But the overall mode is novelistic: The narrative enters the minds of historical characters and introduces fictional characters and events, with no distinction between the two — that is a novel’s prerogative. My question about gain versus pain concerns the novel as such. Awards
"The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. The reality, however, was very different: in the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II, its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution's benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime's euthanasia program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinic's inhabitants.Through the eyes of a child inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, the author of the award-winning The Emperor of Lies, explores the very meaning of survival. An absorbing, emotionally overwhelming novel, rich in incident and character, The Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by the author's sharp sense of the absurd. Passionately serious, meticulously researched, and deeply profound, this extraordinary and dramatic novel bears witness to oppression and injustice, and offers invaluable and necessary insight into an intolerable chapter in Austria's past"--"One of Europe's most revered novelists recounts a terrible, forgotten incident in Nazi-era Vienna"-- No library descriptions found. 
|
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.73Literature German and related languages Other Germanic literatures Swedish literature Swedish fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.83)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
1