Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988)

This was quite a powerful novel by the author better known as half of the 1940s/50s classic film producing partnership of Powell and Pressburger. Written in 1965 it was forgotten about for half a century, after a negative review in the Times Literary Supplement, and reissued in 2015. Set at the time it was written it concerns a (fictional) escaped Nazi war criminal living in London under an assumed identity and seeking a normal life, 20 years after the war's end. He knows the net is closing on him, but does not know exactly who is wielding it, and who is helping them. This novel is highly unusual in being written from the war criminal's point of view, allowing the reader to identify to some extent with the subject's dilemma, while rightly not arousing particular sympathy for him...even more so as, shockingly, he is not just a "standard" concentration camp or Nazi official, but a Mengele type who performed experiments on subjects' brains. This is particularly remarkable a feat of writing given that the author was Jewish.

The book was a very good read, and also gave a good feel for the England of the time, two decades after the war, but before what we usually think of as the 1960s had really taken hold. The ending was certainly dramatic, with a twist in the resolution. My only criticism is that I think it might have been slightly better had the reader not become aware almost at the start of Karl Braun's true background, but come to realise it more slowly as clues emerge. He is certainly clever and cunning and could have deceived the reader for longer, as he does the characters he interacts with, especially Helen Taylor, his (sort of) girlfriend. But this was an excellent read.… (more)

"They are after you. You are on the list. On top of the list. 'Tuning pianos,' indeed! A famous doctor like you."

Karl Braun is a piano tuner living in London approximately 20 years after WW II ended. He is an apparent refugee from Germany. We soon learn that he is biding his time, having heard that the German government had declared a 20 year statute of limitations on prosecuting Nazi war criminals. When he hears that the statute of limitations has been extended he begins to fall apart. He is suspicious of everyone, and he expects to be arrested at any moment. But are the various people Karl suspects are about to arrest him merely figments of his paranoid imagination?

The introduction to this short novel calls it a "troubling study in spiritual corruption." The author is Jewish and lost his mother and many close relatives at Auschwitz, yet he tells the story from the pov of one of the perpetrators of these evils, which is perhaps a bit puzzling. Is he pointing out that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not necessarily inhuman aberrations, but that what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil" is what allowed the Holocaust to happen? I'm not sure, but this was an interesting read.

Recommended
3 1/2 stars… (more)