 | |
| Author | Martin Amis |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
Publication date | 28 August 2014 |
| ISBN | 978-0-385-35349-6 |
| 823/.914 21 | |
The Zone of Interest is the fourteenth novel by the English author Martin Amis, published in 2014. Set in Auschwitz, it tells the story of a Nazi officer who has become enamoured of the camp commandant's wife. The story is conveyed by three narrators: Angelus Thomsen, the officer; Paul Doll, the commandant; and Szmul Zacharias, a Jewish Sonderkommando.
The novel begins in August 1942, with Thomsen's first sight of Hannah Doll, wife of Paul Doll, the camp's commandant (a fictionalised version of Rudolf Höss). He is immediately intrigued and initiates a few encounters with her. In time their relationship becomes more intimate even though it remains unfulfilled. Despite their attempts at discretion, Paul Doll's suspicions are raised. He has her followed by one of the camp's prisoners, and is informed by him that they did indeed make two exchanges of letters. While spying on Hannah in the bathroom (as he does regularly), Paul watches her read the letter from Thomsen secretly and rather excitedly, before destroying it. From that point onward, his wife becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, viciously taunting him in private and embarrassing him in public. Paul decides to assign Szmul, a long-serving member of the Sonderkommando, to the murder of his wife. He does so by threatening to capture Szmul's wife Shulamith. The murder is scheduled to take place on 30 April 1943 – at Walpurgisnacht.
The narrative then skips a few years to the story's aftermath. In September 1948, Thomsen attempts to find Hannah, who has disappeared. He finds her at Rosenheim, where she met her husband. He is told what happened at Walpurgisnacht: at the moment Szmul was to murder Hannah, he instead pointed the weapon on himself and revealed the truth to her. Paul Doll then shot him before he could commit suicide. Thomsen asks Hannah if they could still meet each other. She tells him that while in the concentration camp he was to her a figure for what was sane and decent, outside the camp he simply reminded her of her past life's insanity. Despondently, he withdraws and leaves her.
The novel is divided into six chapters and an epilogue. Each of the six chapters is divided into three sections: the first is narrated by Thomsen, the second by Paul Doll, and the third by Szmul. The epilogue, named Aftermath, is also divided into three sections, all of them narrated by Thomsen, and each devoted to a different woman: first Esther, then Gerda Bormann, and finally Hannah Doll.
The styles and manners of the three narrators vary widely. Thomsen is the protagonist of the novel, mostly indifferent to the camp's crimes until his falling in love with Hannah Doll. His narration is the most reasonable of the three. Paul Doll's style is more eccentric and delusional than Thomsen's. He is zealously devoted to the Nazi effort of genocide, and shows a terrifying apathy to the horrors of the concentration camp. His growing instability is magnified when, during his ruminations, he insists he is a perfectly normal man acting as any other man would. As the German defeat becomes imminent and affects the morale of everyone around him, Doll makes an absurdly detached evaluation of the war's aftermath. Of the three, Szmul is the most obscure, and his narration serves as a small epilogue for each chapter. His tone is sepulchral, and most of his thoughts consist of incredulous reflection on his actions.
Reviews were largely positive, [1] [2] [3] [4] with some naming it Amis's best novel in 25 years, since the much acclaimed London Fields . [1] [2] Joyce Carol Oates, writing for The New Yorker, described the novel as "a compendium of epiphanies, appalled asides, anecdotes, and radically condensed history", with Amis "at his most compelling as a satiric vivisectionist with a cool eye and an unwavering scalpel". [3] A reviewer in The Washington Post gave praise for Amis's singular talent for words, and praised character Paul Doll's narration as "a masterful comic performance". [5]
Criticism of the book mentioned its anticlimactic plot [6] and its overtly misplaced eroticism. [7]
The book was loosely adapted into a feature film of the same title by writer/director Jonathan Glazer: it premiered in 2023. The film won awards at numerous festivals, including the Grand Prix at Cannes, and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, winning two in total. [9]
Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question.
Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986).
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize. Amis was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
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Sonderkommandos were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.
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Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was a German SS officer and the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II, he was convicted in Poland and executed for war crimes committed on the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp and for his role in the Holocaust.
Herbert Lange was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was commandant of Chełmno extermination camp until April 1942, as well as leader of the SS Special Detachment Lange conducting the murder of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto. Lange was responsible for numerous crimes against humanity, including the murder of mentally disabled patients in Poland and in Germany during the Aktion T4 "euthanasia" programme, and became one of the key originators of the Holocaust.
Chełmno or Kulmhof was the first of Nazi Germany's extermination camps and was situated 50 km (31 mi) north of Łódź, near the village of Chełmno nad Nerem. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Germany annexed the area into the new territory of Reichsgau Wartheland. The camp, which was specifically intended for no other purpose than mass murder, operated from December 8, 1941, to April 11, 1943, parallel to Operation Reinhard during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust, and again from June 23, 1944, to January 18, 1945, during the Soviet counter-offensive. In 1943, modifications were made to the camp's killing methods as the reception building had already been dismantled.
London Fields is a blackly comic murder mystery novel by the British writer Martin Amis, published in 1989. The tone gradually shifts from high comedy, interspersed with deep personal introspections, to a dark sense of foreboding and eventually panic at the approach of the deadline, or "horror day", the climactic scene alluded to on the very first page.
The Grey Zone is a 2001 American historical drama film written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, and Daniel Benzali. It is based on the book Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account written by Dr. Miklós Nyiszli.
The Green Man (ISBN 978-0-89733-220-0) is a 1969 novel by British author Kingsley Amis. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer described The Green Man as "three genres of novel in one": ghost story, moral fable, and comic novel. The novel reflects Amis's willingness to experiment with genre novels while displaying many of the characteristics of his conventional novels, both in superficial aspects such as fogeyishness and problems with alcohol, and in more substantive aspects such as a self-reflective observation of human cruelty and selfishness in everyday relations.
Miklós Nyiszli was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered as a doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help the ill with only the most basic medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.
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"You see those Posy Simmonds cartoons of people by the pool having cocktails and saying into the Dictaphone, 'On the second day, the last child died,'" he says. "And I was in Uruguay, with my beautiful wife and beautiful daughters, living a completely stressless life. So I had to do my suffering on the page and, Christ, did I do it. I was very nervous about that book."
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The Chełmno trials were a series of consecutive war-crime trials of the Chełmno extermination camp personnel, held in Poland and in Germany following World War II. The cases were decided almost twenty years apart. The first judicial trial of the former SS men – members of the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof – took place in 1945 at the District Court in Łódź, Poland. The subsequent four trials, held in Bonn, Germany, began in 1962 and concluded three years later, in 1965 in Cologne.
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The term Zone of Interest was used by the occupying Nazi forces to describe the area around the Auschwitz concentration camp complex reserved for the Schutzstaffel (SS), subject to the administration of the main camp. The zone was created on the land confiscated around the camp, as a 40-square-kilometer zone patrolled by the SS, Gestapo, and local police.