Translated from French by John Cullen. Jews, Nazis and Kristallnacht aren't named (except perhaps in a concocted dialect) though that's what the book's clearly about.
A man living in a middle-europe village, is told to write about a recent incident. "You must tell the story, in sequence, one event after another. You mustn't forget anything, but you mustn't add useless details, either. They'll make you veer off your course, and you'll run the risk of confusing or even irritating your readers" (p.31). We learn that the men of the village (not the narrator) have killed "De Anderer", an enigmatic, quiet, arts-loving man who'd been living in the village for 3 months.
The narrator arrived as a 4-year-old orphan in the village over 30 years before, brought by an old lady. The village befriended him, gave him a house and later paid him to go to university (because the villagers felt that at least one of them should be educated). There he met his wife-to-be. He spent time in a concentration camp where he was prepared to accept humiliation in order to survive. Others didn't.
Though we already know the who, what and where of the crime, the novel has the pacing of a detective novel. The narrator jumps around in time as he collects information for his report. The drunken non-believing priest has heard the villagers' confessions. There's no shortage of detail, even when meeting minor characters. E.g. - "In order to speak to me, she'd interrupted a conversation with Frida Niegel, a magpie-eyed hunchback who always smells like a stable. She and Mother Pitz love to review all the widows and widowers in the village and the surrounding hamlets and imagine possible remarriages. They write the names on little pieces of cardboard, and for hours, like cardplayers, with mounting excitement they arrange the deck into pairs", p.81.
We learn that before killing the man, some villages killed his horse and donkey - his right hand ... was clutching something that looked like a hank of long, slightly faded blond hair. It was the hair of his horse's tail, which emerged from the Staubi like a mooring line ... I could see two large masses below the surface of the water, calm, ponderous bulks which the river currents were very gently stirring. The sight was unreal and almost peaceful: the big horse and the smaller donkey, both drowned, floating underwater with wide-open eyes. Because of some unknown phenomenon, the donkey's coat was decorated with thousands of miniscule air bubbles, as polished and shiny as pearls (p.284).
The narrator fears that he or his family may suffer if he fails. "When I read the pages of my account thus far, I see that I move around in words like tracked game on the run, sprinting, zigzagging", p.106. As late as p.261 we learn that his daughter, and his wife's mutism, resulted from a gang-bang while he was away. Soldiers and villagers were involved. When he delivers the report it's burnt before his eyes. He leaves with his family early the next morning.
I liked the book. It has that mixture of fable and realism that's rather common in Holocaust novels.
Other reviews
- Giles Foden (Uncertainty is a major theme of Claudel's novel, which is both fable-like and documentary in style. ... One aspect of his literary skill is his assignment of a whole package of experience to a single powerful metaphor. ... With his otherworldly expression, kindly smile and outlandish robes, the Anderer is an enigma. A flamboyant artist who comes to the village to draw its inhabitants, he stands in for all strangers, for the unknown in all its guises.)
- Caryn James (“Brodeck” is the Brothers Grimm by way of Kafka)
- kirkusreviews (Much of the action occurs in an isolated mountain village in the European heartland. The time is a convincing fusion of modern and medieval; while there are parallels to Nazi Germany, the peasant villagers belong in a Breughel painting. The eponymous narrator was not born in the village (a key point) ... Claudel constantly shuffles the chronological order and passes up opportunities for suspense as he presses his inquiry into the nature of evil. )
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