The Zone of Interest
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
From one the most virtuosic authors in the English language: a powerful novel, written with urgency and moral force, that explores life—and love—among the Nazi bureaucrats of Auschwitz.
"A masterpiece . . . Profound, powerful, and morally urgent . . . A benchmark for what serious literature can achieve." —San Francisco Chronicle
Martin Amis first tackled the Holocaust in 1991 with his bestselling novel Time's Arrow. He returns again to the Shoah with this astonishing portrayal of life in "the zone of interest," or "kat zet"—the Nazis' euphemism for Auschwitz. The narrative rotates among three main characters: Paul Doll, the crass, drunken camp commandant; Thomsen, nephew of Hitler's private secretary, in love with Doll's wife; and Szmul, one of the Jewish prisoners charged with disposing of the bodies. Through these three narrative threads, Amis summons a searing, profound, darkly funny portrait of the most infamous place in history.
An epilogue by the author elucidates Amis's reasons and method for undertaking this extraordinary project.
Customer Reviews
Unusual points of view on a horrific topic
Overall, this is a very good story, told from multiple points of view, about the day to day lives of people living and working in a concentration camp. It’s an odd blend of the terrible with the mundane, showing how they could exist side by side. The only downside is that the narrator uses almost the same tone, timbre and expressiveness for each character. When you pick up the story, you sometimes need the context of what is being said, or a specific way of speaking that one character has to remember which characters is talking. This would have been 5/5 if they had hired different narrators for each character.