The Zone of Interest

Livro absolutamente brilhante, narração em três vozes cada qual contribuindo para a absorção da banalidade do mal pelo leitor. Desde pela perspectiva da pilhéria (a figura patética do Comandante), a perspectiva que tinha sim nazis cultos ao contrário do que o alto escalão burro feitos uma porta faz parecer (Thomsen) e a perspectiva judaica, porém breve (o professor).
É um livro muito interessante em termos psicológicos, é uma ficção histórica que usa livros de não ficção para ser escrita com maestria, inclusive toda a bibliografia está presente ao final da edição, me parece que Amis pode apreender muito da complexidade do que ocorreu aos alemães naquela década e é sempre muito bom termos acesso a esse tipo de show more perspectiva psicológica inteligente da história.

Plus: Martin Amis morreu há exatamente um ano, no dia da estreia do filme do Jonathan Glazer em Cannes. show less

Amazing evocation of Arendt's "the banality of evil" - while you never sympathize with the concentration camp overlords, you feel the deep ordinariness of how they've come to see their work. More disturbing in today's era, you see how easily people "just do their jobs" of destruction by demonizing and then condemning the other. Chilling.

Tra le tre e le quattro stellette, forse più vicino alle 4. Forse le mie aspettative erano troppo alte? Forse l'ho letto in un momento non adatto?
Non lo so, ma non l'ho trovato il capolavoro che tutti dicono: Ha un approccio particolare all'olocausto e alla fine della guerra, interessante l'idea di vedere le cose da tre punti di vista differenti e, sotto molti aspetti, cinica: il punto di vista è sempre quello di chi le persone le vede morire, siano essi SS, ebrei che lavorano nei campi e che sanno cosa sta succedendo o i parenti di chi le cose sa che stanno succedendo. Però c'è qualcosa che non mi ha "coinvolto" (e non mi aspettavo si piangere, forse mi aspettavo si incazzarmi).

Martin Amis has written a harrowing and chilling novel about the organisation and running of a concentration camp in Poland in the Second World War. Told through the testimony of three people: Golo Thomsen, a liaison office between the military and the commercial companies based at the camp; Paul Doll, the camp commandant; and Szmul, a Jewish prisoner of the Sonderkommando, charged with reassuring new inmates and then stripping corpses, the book explores the brutality and ultimate futility of the Nazi’s Final Solution.
Amis’ prose dissects the dehumanising conditions of the camp and how this affects the mental balance of the officers in charge and captures their blind and unswerving belief in the aims of the Third Reich. And yet in show more this chilling and desensitising atmosphere the re can be glimmers of feeling. For a few, small acts of kindness have profound effects upon the recipients and that even amid all this cruelty, there is the possibility of respect for others.
It makes for a disturbing and different book and one that has a great effect upon the reader. show less

I skipped the last Amis as it felt too familiar but this was worth coming back to. Set at a concentration camp but told mostly from the POV of the Germans, Amis has never been accused of avoiding controversy. He is unafraid of using humour and other wholly inappropriate devices to tell a tale of the death camps but his boldness never overshadows the awe and horror that the Holocaust inspires.

I don't think this book is quite as successful as Time's Arrow, but Amis's continued grappling with man's inhumanity to man is the mark of a fine novelist and a mensch.

That the new Martin Amis novel, The Zone of Interest, is set in a World War II German concentration camp likely reduces the size of the book’s potential audience because many readers are simply not willing to peer very closely into that degree of darkness and depravity. In fact, publishers in France and Germany have been reluctant to even take on the book – although, finally, a small French publisher has decided to release it in late 2015. (The Germans apparently believe that the novel places some of the Nazi administrators in too positive a light.)

It is more than the subject matter, however, that will make it difficult for some readers to finish the novel, it is also the general approach that Amis takes in telling his story – he show more uses satire and, of all things, humor, to portray how a culture as sophisticated and “civilized” as Germany’s allowed something like the Holocaust happen. Throw in a somewhat twisted love story, and you have the makings of an off-putting novel, one to which some will be reluctant to give a chance.

This, for instance, is typical of the humor Amis sometimes uses in the novel’s dialogue. In conversation with another officer, one camp officer justifies inclusion of Jewish women and children in the overall slaughter this way:

“Those babes in arms will grow up and want revenge on the Nazis in about 1963. I suppose the rationale for the women under forty-five is that they might be pregnant. And the rationale for the older women is while we’re at it.”

Amis uses three very different narrators in The Zone of Interest: Golo Thompsen, Paul Doll, and a man called Szmul. Thompsen, a German officer and the nephew of Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, plays a minor role in the camp’s day-to-day activities. Doll is the camp’s mentally unstable commandant who is slowly breaking under pressure from Berlin to dispose of the camp’s inmates at what seems to him an impossible rate. Szmul is one of Doll’s Jewish inmates, a man who has stayed alive only by working hard at “salvaging” the valuables of those designated for extermination – even down to the gold in their teeth and the hair on their heads.

The Zone of Interest is part love story, part horror novel. One of the most telling aspects of the effectiveness of Martin Amis’s approach is that, as I read the story, I was more shocked by the casualness with which the Nazis killed than by the actual details of what went on inside the camp. I was appalled by the thought that the whole thing, for camp administrators, became more of an engineering problem than a realization that they were murdering human beings. It was all about the process: how to dispose of the leftover bodies of thousands upon thousands of people, and how to kill more of them in the most efficient manner possible. It was all about processing “material.”

The Zone of Interest is not a novel I will soon forget. show less

A shocking and memorable read - as horrible a story as you can imagine, but you just keep on reading it ti see what happens. One of the amazing things it portrays is the complete dissassociation by the Nazis of what they were actually doing - the dissasociation of the people who perpetrated the crimes from the actual human cost which was clear as day, and being actively ignored. . It comes as no surprise that many were consuming large quantities of drugs like methamphetamine, while drinking heavily to overcome the vestiges of guilt (and to ignor the ongoing defeat which at the time of the novel's action is clear) that might have seeped through. A focus on the relationship of a German officer and the wife of the camp commandant serves to show more highlight the incomprehensible discord between what was going on and how it was actually percieved by the instigators. Also of note are the many passages which use puns, and other language humor (actually turns out to be horrible, inexcuusable black humor in this case) in modalities, in counterpoint to the war crimes, the effect is to amplify the horrible monstrosities of operation of the camps - masking them as everyday business for the Reich. show less