Review by New York Times Review
"THE TALL YOUNG MEN" Was Irwin Shaw's name for the squad of just-graduated Ivy Leaguers who showed up at his Paris apartment in the American arrondissement in the early 1950s to beat him in tennis, drink his booze and bask in the afterglow of Hemingway and Stein. One of these urbane aspiring writers was 24-year-old Peter Matthiessen, fresh out of Yale and wrestling with his first novel, who, along with George Plimpton, William Styron, Harold Humes, Thomas Guinzburg and a few other hard-partying expats, would go on to start The Paris Review in 1953. Matthiessen, who died earlier this month at the age of 86, was one of the first of the tall young men to return to the United States after their Gallic idyll had ended. In the long career that followed, he remained above all a voyager, bestriding the world as a novelist, journalist and naturalist with an epic degree of freedom to explore his far-flung passions, which included environmental activism, Zen Buddhism and the sufferings of indigenous people. From Matthiessen's travels sprang more than 30 books of nonfiction and fiction. Among the best, and best known, are "The Snow Leopard," a 1978 account of his trek through the Himalayas with the wildlife biologist George Schaller, and "Shadow Country" (2008), a meticulous single-volume revision of his 1990s fiction trilogy about Edgar Watson, a real-life Everglades plantation owner who was murdered by neighbors around the turn of the 20th century. Matthiessen's final novel, "In Paradise," was inspired by his treks through a different wilderness. Beginning in 1996, he participated in three Zen retreats on the grounds of the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. In a news release for the book, Matthiessen noted with a characteristic mix of diffidence and determination that he had long wanted to write about Auschwitz, but felt unqualified, "as a non-Jewish American journalist," to do so in a work of nonfiction. A novel, for him, was more defensible. "Only fiction," he said, "would allow me to probe from a variety of viewpoints the great strangeness of what I had felt." Yet the advantages of fiction hardly guarantee easy access into this thorniest of subjects. In fact, "In Paradise" is itself a kind of symposium on the many ways Auschwitz defies our contemporary attempts to approach it. Foremost among the novel's viewpoints is that of its protagonist, D. Clements Olin, a Massachusetts literature professor in his mid-50s who travels to Auschwitz in December 1996 to research a monograph on the Polish story writer and former inmate Tadeusz Borowski. Though "experienced in meditation practice," Olin is not officially enrolled in the weeklong Zen retreat taking place among the crematories. He has informally attached himself to the event only to pursue his research, intending to come and go on his own. As he hovers around its periphery, Olin balks at the retreat's aim of "bearing witness," through prayer and personal testimony, to the atrocities that took place there. The phrase itself seems to him outdated and irrelevant. He doubts that anyone other than an elderly survivor could possibly bear witness to anything so many years after the war. What can these earnest pilgrims hope to experience, he wonders, "beyond unearned gratification of shallow spiritual ambition? Their mission here, however well intended, is little more than a wave of parting to a ghostly horror already withdrawing into myth." Nor does Olin have much faith in the value of his own study of Borowski, a non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who committed suicide a few years after the war at the age of 28, and whose harsh tales of prisoners' lives in "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" (1959) denied any possibility of heroism. Olin asks himself, "What could his research possibly contribute that has not, long since, with lacerating eloquence, been flayed upon the page?" In counterpoint to Olin's private misgivings are the fervent and quarrelsome beliefs of the retreat's 140 participants, among them several rabbis, two nuns, a former monk, an evolutionary biologist, a Palestinian, a few elderly survivors, some apologetic young Germans and the group's Buddhist leader, a bearded and balding "ex-hippie ex-Orthodox Jew" nicknamed Ben Lama. At evening gatherings, after the daily prayer vigils and recitations of names of the dead have concluded, there are Arendtian debates about the nature of evil, questions about the wartime culpability of the church, discussions of Holocaust fatigue, Holocaust denial, Holocaust exceptionalism. Much is analyzed; nothing is resolved. After such knowledge, what consensus? The noisiest voice in this hubbub belongs to a pugnacious character who calls himself G. Earwig, and who scuttles around the retreat shouting furious denunciations against just about everybody. Rude to his fellow Jews, violently anti-Catholic, scornful of the busloads of tour groups that in his view have made Auschwitz into a theme park, Earwig is the Mickey Sabbath of this crowd, a bitter provocateur whose energy provides a welcome contrast to the fretful hand-wringing of Olin and the other witness-bearers. It's easy to imagine that Earwig might have served as the central figure in a similar narrative by Philip Roth, or by authors of anger-fueled satires such as Tova Reich ("My Holocaust") and Francine Prose ("Guided Tours of Hell"). Yet Matthiessen chose to train his attention on Olin, a pale and waffling figure who seems to have wandered over from an Anita Brookner novel. Olin's signature characteristic is his inability to engage. He's affiliated with a meditation group back home in Cambridge, but describes himself as "a lifelong nonbeliever," prodded more, it appears, by skepticism than by faith. In the wake of a failed early marriage, he has drifted into "passive liaisons" with one unsuitable woman after another; here, among the ashes, he finds himself attracted to an insubordinate young nun, in an ungainly plot development that seems less transgressive than inert. Even his discovery of some murky family secrets - his lineage of landowning Polish Lutheran aristocrats, originally named Olinski, may not be as impeccable as he's been encouraged to believe - plays out with a weariness that rebuffs the reader's sympathies. There are some powerful episodes in the novel despite the enervation at its center. At one point, in a break from their tense meditation sessions and fraught dialogues, the retreat participants slip into a spontaneous moment of unity expressed through singing and dancing. While some remain appalled by the impropriety of this "unholy exaltation," most are delighted by the rare unmediated experience; even Olin professes to be moved. In another strong scene, an elderly former prisoner, who was silent for decades about his internment until a stroke liberated his memory, shows off a mural he's created in a nearby abandoned chapel whose completion, he hopes, will allow him to die in peace. On the whole, however, "In Paradise," like its protagonist, is so suffused with qualms about its legitimacy that it stifles its own anguish. Overwhelmed by the weight of history and commentary, it's a postlapsarian tour of a once-real place, reduced now to "a gray scene with harsh black outlines as in old news clips." What will happen to Auschwitz's strange power, Olin wonders, when "the last barracks, the last guard post, all that barbed wire and broken brick, will be stripped off and scavenged"? And might the tall young author ever have thought that his last imaginative voyage would finish at this railway terminus with such pallid bafflement? To his credit, as a novelist Matthiessen never stopped attempting to navigate through the hardest questions and the least forgiving terrain his large world had to offer. But a novel narrated with such exhaustion can't hope to provoke much more than exhaustion from its readers, even when its creator was as expansive and rigorous as Peter Matthiessen. DONNA RIFKIND is writing a book about the screenwriter Salka Viertel and her Hollywood émigré salon.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 27, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After participating in three Zen retreats at Auschwitz, Matthiessen addresses that experience with what, at 86, may very well be his final novel. With In Paradise, the two-time National Book Award-winner doesn't shy away from boldly tackling the most profound of subjects. And as protagonist Clements Olin wonders, what fresh insights into the horror of the camps remain to be had, especially from someone without direct experience of the camp? Olin, a Polish-born American scholar and Holocaust authority, joins an ecumenical group that includes Germans, Poles, Israelis, Jews, Catholic nuns, and Zen Buddhists at the death camp for a fortnight of homage, prayer, and silent meditation . . . to bear witness lest the world forget man's depthless capacity for evil. Some attend to alleviate shame or guilt, while others are tourists and Holocaust voyeurs and still others are looking for some sort of closure or healing. But earnestness is overrun with grievances as, Olin observes, behind all the good will, there are so many old hates. Arguments, accusations, and old resentments erupt, disrupting any silent meditation. Olin's motivations for attending are initially obscure, but we learn that his family might not all have escaped to the U.S. when the Nazis came to power in Poland. Matthiessen expertly raises the challenges and the difficulties inherent in addressing this subject matter, proving, as the muralist Malan says, that the creation of art is the only path that might lead toward the apprehension of that ultimate evil . . . that the only way to understand such evil is to reimagine it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The world-renowned naturalist and author Peter Matthiessen, in his first work of fiction since the 2008 National Book Award winner, Shadow Country, pens what may be the 86-year-old author's last word in this powerful novel about the Holocaust.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Early in this novel by Matthiessen (Shadow Country), which follows a meditative retreat at Auschwitz, main character Clements Olin thinks, "Nobody knows whom to be angry with in such a place." Indeed, the story centers on the search for understanding on the part of the retreaters, and their attempt to spiritually confront the evil that occurred at the site. What makes Matthiessen's latest stand out from the scores of other Holocaust books is that Olin, a non-Jewish academic of Polish descent, is aware of the vast Holocaust literature ("You got some new angle on mass murder, maybe, that ain't been written up yet in maybe ten thousand fucking books?" someone asks him)-and feels self-doubt to the point of defeat about what he's doing in Auschwitz in the first place. More concretely, Olin is there for two reasons: one is "personal" and "too sentimental" and isn't revealed until later in the book; the other is to figure out why Polish author Tadeusz Borowski, who survived the death camp, later committed suicide at the peak of his fame, three days after the birth of his daughter. The strongest sections relate to these more concrete missions-passages about Olin's family history, in particular, stand out. But the novel focuses mainly on the abstract: what it feels like to spend days on end at the death camp-the frustration, alienation, and otherworldliness of it. Throughout, there's a hum of absurdity underneath ("Who sets out winter food for little birds in such a place?"), and at times it comes to the surface in the form of directionless bickering among the retreaters, only to fade back again into the landscape, which, it seems to Olin, is always in winter. Agent: Neil Olson, Donadio & Olson, Inc. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Matthiessen's final book (he died in 2014), writer and English professor Clements Olin spends a week in Auschwitz's Nazi officers' quarters along with a group of 140 people who have come to pray and bear witness in an attempt to find closure and healing. Participants come from all over the world and include rabbis, nuns, survivors, and perpetrators. As Clements participates in the tours and discussions, he discovers new, painful, and shocking information about his family and his past. Although Mark Bramhall does an excellent job reading the book and articulating the various accents, it is sometimes difficult to recognize who is speaking. Verdict Recommended for libraries with Holocaust collections, though the print version might be easier to follow than the audiobook. ["Not a mere recounting but a persuasive meditation on Auschwitz's history and mythology, this novel from three-time National Book Award winner Matthiessen uses scenes of confrontation, recollection, bitterness, and self-examination to trace aspects of culture that led to the Holocaust and that still reverberate today," read the starred review of the Riverhead hc, LJ 3/15/14.]-Ilka Gordon, Aaron Garber Lib., Beachwood, OH (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The peripatetic Matthiessen (Shadow Country, 2008, etc.) ponders Auschwitz decades after the Holocaust, in a novel that's philosophical, mordant and surprisingly romantic. Clements Olin is a 55-year-old professor of Slavic literature with a specialty in works by Holocaust survivors. That interest has been an abstraction for him for much of his career, but as he visits the Nazi camp for a two-week spiritual retreat in 1996, his understanding becomes more emotionally concrete. Clements is one of 140 pilgrims there, and the agenda includes a mix of tourism, meditation, and evening dinner discussions that inevitably turn into heated arguments about God, anti-Semitism, patriotism and man's capacity for evil. Chief among the instigators is Earwig, who rains contempt upon the visitors, whom he considers "soft and runny as one-minute eggs." Clements is tolerant of the man's profane reprimandshe's the necessary point of entry for Matthiessen's musings, after allbut the professor has other things on his mind. First of these is learning what happened to his mother, who lived near the camps and may have been sent there; second is Sister Catherine, a young nun whose spiritual unsteadiness serves as a magnet for Clements' own spiritual and romantic anxieties. Matthiessen handles these threads gracefully and without a studious reverence for his novel's difficult subject; Earwig is the book's comic relief as well as its angry id. Even so, In Paradise as a whole feels overly formal; the framing device of the retreat makes the philosophizing feel potted (today, the perils of patriotism, tomorrow, the complicity of the Catholic Church, and so on) and Clements' emotional longings, constricted. A burst of spontaneous dancing on the retreat gives the book a similarly surprising lift, but it's quickly back to hand-wringing and self-loathing. An admirable, if muted, minor-key study of the meaning of survivorship.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
