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The Zone of Interest – Martin Amis
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THE ZONE OF INTEREST : A Novel

Martin Amis
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Telling The Love Story Of A Nazi Officer Who Has Become Enamored With The Camp Commandant’s Wife.

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9780099593683
Book Condition LIKE NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Vintage
Publication Date 28 May 2015
Pages 320
Weight 0.4 kg
Dimension 20 × 13 × 2.5 cm
Availability: Out of stock

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★★ Powered by both wit and compassion, and in characteristically vivid prose, this love story with a violently unromantic setting excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul. “Powerful and electric…. A book that may stand for years as the triumph of his career.” —NPR ★★
 
★★ From one of England’s most renowned authors, an unforgettable new novel that provides a searing portrait of life-and, shockingly, love-in a concentration camp.★★
 
Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other’s eye, after we have seen who we really are?
 
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 enamored with 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 Zone of Interest revisits the Holocaust themes explored in Time’s Arrow. Told from the perspectives of two Nazis and a Jew, the novel examines the horrors of Auschwitz by chronicling the quotidian romantic entanglements of the former two alongside the grim duties imposed…
 
Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.
 
The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.
 
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll.
 
As Thomsen and Doll’s wife pursue their passion – the gears of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution grinding around them – Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him.
 
The novel begins in August 1942, with Thomsen’s first sight of Hannah Doll, wife of Paul Doll, the camp’s commandant. (Doll’s name is similar to Otto Moll, a notorious camp commandant in real life.) 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 April 30, 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 supposed 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.
 
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Review From NPR
 
Martin Amis’ ‘Zone Of Interest’ Is An Electrically Powerful Holocaust Novel
 
When I picked up Martin Amis’ new novel, The Zone of Interest, it felt as though I had touched a third rail, so powerful and electric is the experience of reading it. After years of playing the snide card and giving his great store of talents to the business of giving other people the business, Amis has turned again to the matter of Nazi horrors (he tried to deal with it in a gimmicky way in his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow), and the result is a book that may stand for years as the triumph of his career.
 
No gimmicks here in the Kat Zet (the German rendering of KZ, an abbreviation for the word for concentration camp). Auschwitz III, as you might know, was the site of one of the Nazi state’s most infamous death and slave labor camps, though it may take a reading of Amis’ novel for many people — I was one of them — to discover that it was also the site of the I.G. Farben’s Buna-Werke, the industrial center where scientists and technicians worked feverishly to perfect the production of synthetic rubber, the potential secret weapon of Germany’s war machine.
 
Attached to the staff at Auschwitz, where in winter the snow turned brown with the detritus of human smoke and the stench of death sometimes spread out for 50 miles around, is Angelus “Golo” Thomsen, the nephew of Hitler’s personal secretary. Thomsen holds the rank of Obersturmfuhrer and serves as the Nazi High Command’s liaison with the Buna-Werke. He’s a serious womanizer and keeps up a high level of ironic banter with a few fellow officers, mostly gallows humor about the work of the Final Solution going on before their eyes.
 
“What don’t we do to them?” Thomsen asks his friend Boris, referring to the new arrivals to the camps. Boris is a cynical senior colonel in the Waffen-SS, demoted to a tour of duty at Auschwitz for getting into a fistfight with a ranking officer during service at the Russian front. “I suppose we don’t rape them,” Thomsen continues. “Much,” says Boris. “Would you agree that we couldn’t treat them any worse?” Thomsen says. “Oh, I don’t know,” Boris replies. “We don’t eat them.”
 
Much to his friend’s dismay, Thomsen falls in love with Hannah Doll, the wife of the camp commandant. Paul Doll is a miserable parody of a Nazi murderer, referred to behind his back as Old Boozer, who soon sees evidence of his wife’s disloyalty. This sets in motion a plot that puts Thomsen and his beloved in dreadful danger and exposes to the naked eye the debauchery, thievery, criminal incompetence and culpability of everyone assisting in the horrors of the Holocaust, from the highest-ranking Nazis to the I.G.
 
Farben plant managers and technicians down to the Jewish Sonderkommandos, the complicit Jewish prisoners spared long enough to assist with the murderous work of conducting trainload after arriving trainload of Jewish captives into the gas chambers.
 
The web of actions that Amis constructs around the love affair — whether it’s consummated or not becomes of no regard against the background of horrors in the camp — rises to the level of brilliance. We actually come to sympathize with Thomsen and Hannah Doll as they delicately thread their way through the intricacies and madness of their situation (no small aesthetic feat in itself) as the German war machine stalls, and then fails, at Stalingrad.
 
Trumping both of them is Amis’ creation of the character of Szmul, a longtime survivor of the current group of Sonderkommandos, “the saddest men in the history of the world,” as he himself describes his ilk. Szmul emerges as a virtually Shakespearean figure, in the scope of his insight and the ironic majesty of his descent from virtue to earthly monster in order to survive.
 
“I used to have the greatest respect for nightmares,” we hear him declaim — “for their intelligence and artistry. Now I think nightmares are pathetic. They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all the day … ”
 
In an afterword, Amis meditates on the irony of writing about the unspeakable. It would be unspeakable to cheer for what he has created in these pages. Nevertheless, he has turned his copious talent into writing something east of history, beyond nightmare, and somewhere north of the conventional wisdom about the nature of hell.
 
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About Author :
 
Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time’s Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. He lives in New York.
 
Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time’s Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
 
Amis’s work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called “the new unpleasantness”. Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

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