The Zone of Interest
A stark and unsettling portrait of complicity inside Auschwitz, now an Oscar-winning film
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4.0 • 20 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Angelus Thomsen works at Auschwitz, dividing his attention between the demands of his post and an intimate fixation.
Thomsen moves through a world of bureaucratic meetings, garden parties, and marital rivalries, all conducted in the shadow of industrialised murder.
The machinery of the war operates with chilling efficiency, yet the men who oversee it concern themselves with promotion, jealousy, and reputation. Through Thomsen, Commandant Paul Doll and those around them, The Zone of Interest exposes the moral evasions and self-justifications that allow atrocity to coexist with ordinary ambition.
By placing its focus not on victims but on perpetrators and bystanders, The Zone of Interest confronts the reader with the unsettling proximity between civility and cruelty, forcing a reckoning with complicity, desire, and the banality of evil inside the Holocaust.
‘It is exceptionally brave…. Shakespearean…. It’s exciting; it’s alive; it’s more than slightly mad. As the title suggests, it is dreadfully interesting.’ Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An absolute soul-crusher of a book, the brilliant latest from Amis (Lionel Asbo: State of England) is an astoundingly bleak love story, as it were, set in a German concentration camp, which Thomsen, one of the book's three narrators, refers to as Kat Zet. Thomsen, the nephew of Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, has a vague role as a liaison at Buna Werke, where the Germans are attempting to synthesize oil for the war effort using slave labor. He sets his sights on Hannah Doll, wife of camp commandant Paul, who is the second of three narrators as well as a drunk whose position is under threat. As Thomsen gets closer with Hannah, both of them, horrified at what's going on, conspire to undermine Paul Hannah at home and Thomsen around the camp. Paul, meanwhile, follows up his suspicions about his wife and Thomsen by involving Szmul, the book's third narrator and a Jew who disposes of the corpses in the gas chamber, in a revenge plot. Amis took on the Holocaust obliquely in Time's Arrow. Here he goes at it straight, and the result is devastating.
