Product description from Amazon: "The report that Brodeck is writing into the lynching of an artist, an outsider, a flamboyant Other figure who has deeply disturbed the fragile equilibrium of the town he briefly settled in, becomes a report into the catastrophe of his own life. Brodeck, it seems, himself also an outsider, has lately returned from a concentration camp. In the course of his investigation into the death of the artist, he uncovers the truth about his distant origins, about his having been rounded up when the Germans came to the town, and all that happened to his family when he was gone. This immensely powerful chronicle of a community's fear and loathing of what is strange, what is from the outside, has been hailed as one of the outstanding European novels of the last decade."

The power of this book--and it is very powerful--lies in the use of unexpected words to describe a time, and events, that are terribly familiar to us. World War II, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Holocaust--they are recent history, and every schoolchild knows what happened in that place, in that time.

You will not find any of these names in this beautifully written poem of a book. The magic lies in the way Mr. Claudel finds new language to describe who and what he is talking about. Every time a figure or event from this well-traveled landscape of history arrives, it strikes at the heart all over again, as if you've never heard it before.

In a small valley town in a nameless country, a stranger has been murdered by a mob consisting of every man in the village. The stranger is known only as the Anderer, the Other. Brodeck, a man who has recently returned from a place that sounds very much like a concentration camp, is ordered to write an official report of what happened. As Brodeck investigates the murder, we learn the tragedy of his own history, the awful secret of why he was sent to the camp, and the horror of what individuals are capable of doing once they combine into a faceless mob. ( )

Bouleversant. ( )