Amis aims at Auschwitz

If you read one book this week

The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh (Hutchinson) R210

An accomplished debut set in poverty-stricken, backwoods Missouri. Teenaged Lucy Dane investigates the murder of a friend, a killing that echoes the disappearance of Dane's own mother some years previously. As she digs deeper into her family's secrets, she confronts the fact that those she loves are deeply flawed people.

The issue

The big news is Martin Amis's The Zone of Interest, out this week. It concerns the Holocaust, a subject Amis last covered in 2003's Time's Arrow.

The early reviews are positive; as the London Sunday Times put it, "The Zone of Interest is, as one would expect, brilliant: a technical and aesthetic tour de force that takes us inside the minds of the Germans who managed Auschwitz. The oddity of this perspective is intensified by the fact that the book is also a love story about a passion that flickers grotesquely against the background of the farcical practicalities of evil unleashed."

Amis told the newspaper, "When I started writing I thought maybe it was just a short story. I had my hesitations and confusions, but it wasn't difficult to write. I think I've done all the agonising."

Some of that agonising concerned Amis's own history. "I was born four years after the death of the Little Moustache [Hitler] and four years before the death of the Big Moustache [Stalin]. They were these huge figures. I can remember when Stalin was referred to as 'Uncle Joe' in the Daily Mirror. When I was about seven, I asked my mother what all this stuff about railway tracks and smoke-stacks was all about, and she said, 'Oh, don't worry about Hitler. You've got blond hair and blue eyes - Hitler would have loved you.' I felt a kind of ignoble relief that Hitler would have been on my side."

There were notable differences between the two 'moustaches', according to Amis. One was explicable, the other not.

"Stalin, from his youth, read Chekhov, Zola, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, Shakespeare. Hitler just read crap ethnology and the westerns of Karl May, a German. The point is, you can say that what Stalin did, except for the excesses, is not incompatible with reason and possible outcomes. You can't begin to do that with Hitler."

The newspaper did note there were Amis fans who longed for the "more humble delights" of The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies or even the "serious" novels such as Money. But Amis was aghast at the suggestion. "When I look back at my early stuff, I'm horrified by how crude it is. I am appalled by the vulgarisms in my early books."

The bottom line

"Mr Ford, I don't think what we are being offered here [Volkswagen] is worth a damn." - The Life of the Automobile: The Complete History of the Motor Car by Steven Parissien (Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin's Press).