NP Unity by Michael Arditti

[jbor at bigpond.com]

> On Jun 19, 2006, at 9:07 PM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
>
>> Reviewed by Ed Wright, SMH 19 June 2006.
>>
>> "Books concerned with Nazism and the Holocaust have been in vogue in  
>> English language publishing recently. Locally, Auschwitz survivor  
>> Jacob G. Rosenberg's excellent East of Time recently won the NSW  
>> Premier's Literary Award for non-fiction. Yet writers with no direct  
>> connection to these horrors are beginning to choose them for subject  
>> matter and it may be that as the atrocities of World War II ebb from  
>> living memory, they are losing their power of taboo. Michael  
>> Arditti's Unity is one such book. [...]"

On 20/06/2006, at 9:32 PM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> It's one I want to read. Love the Mitfords.
>
> A different sort of Holocaust "taboo" was faced by Pynchon 33 years  
> ago and is apparently in effect even today. .
>
> Under no circumstances fail to cross all the t's and dot all the i's.

The other one that came out not too long ago was 'The Book Thief' by  
Markus Zusak. I heard him speak and read excerpts from it before he'd  
finished editing it a couple of years back. He's quite a young writer  
with a number of Young Adult titles to his credit previously, but 'The  
Book Thief' was his entry into Adult Fiction here (though I think it  
has been marketed as Young Adult fiction in the US). Anyway, it's  
mostly-based on first-hand stories told to him by his parents and other  
family members and friends, with "Death" as the narrator, so it's sort  
of in-between the survivor testimony non-fictions and the new crop of  
taboo-breaking fictions. I believe it has scored good reviews over  
there:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375831002/ref=ase_wamu-20/002 
-3113523-7244849?s=books&v=glance&n=283155&tagActionCode=wamu-20

best