Powers on Omega Minor

[Ya Sam]

Sorry if it has been posted before. Here is some info in English on the 
'Pynchon reflex' novel by the Flemish writer Paul Verhaeghen.



"The book's translation to English, with publication by Dalkey Archive 
Press, is expected in 2007. Publication in German by Eichborn Press is due 
out mid-2006.

American novelist Richard Powers, after reading "Omega minor," says in a 
2005 interview for "Knack," a Belgian weekly publication, "It is an amazing 
book. Much contemporary American literature does not dare raise its head. It 
is domesticated. Verhaeghen, on the other hand, takes on the whole 20th 
century in a single novel."

Set in early 1995, the 612-page novel touches on the Manhattan Project, 
Hitler, Heisenberg and the Holocaust, bouncing between 1995 and 1935, 
Auschwitz and Los Alamos, Potsdam and Berlin. Approaching the 50th 
anniversary of the end of World War II, the story is about the madness and 
cruelty of the 20th century and asks whether the war really is over.

As Verhaeghen puts it, "What if the violence of the new state is the same as 
the violence of the vanquished Reich?"

In Ludo Stynen's review of the novel in "World Literature Today," he 
describes "Omega minor" as a sea of stories, plots and subplots yielding a 
panoramic view of the 20th century. "

http://sunews.syr.edu/story_details.cfm?id=3048

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