MONTJOY

An academic analyzing the possibly fantastical diary of a former SS officer struggles to come to grips with his own son’s death in Finch’s novel.

During the construction of the Mauthausen Memorial in Austria, a chocolate box containing the personal effects—including a diary—of an SS officer named Rikard Anton Boecker is unearthed. The unnamed protagonist and narrator of this mesmerizing novel, a university professor in Manchester, England, volunteers to read the diary and, as best as possible, determine its historical veracity, a difficult challenge given its nature as an “amalgam of fact and fiction.” The central story that emerges from the diary is astonishing: Boecker—who was born Martin Tauber but changed his name for reasons that only become hazily intelligible by the end of the novel—claims a vigilante named Karl Redlich brutally terrorized Nazis in Berlin, a profoundly implausible tale. The more deeply the protagonist considers the diary of the man whose “face wears a deathly seriousness,” the more he considers the author an unreliable narrator, maybe even psychologically disturbed. He wonders if the story is the fantasy of a “helpless bureaucrat” who could no longer bear his own moral complicity in Nazi crimes, a “revenge fantasy told by a man in no position to stop it.” The narrator, who comes to believe Tauber killed himself, wrestles with the suicide of his own son, Zach, a tragedy so heartrending it precipitated the collapse of his marriage to his wife, Ruth.

This is an eclectically structured novel—in addition the protagonist’s first-person narration, the text includes his synopsis of Tauber’s diary and the analysis of it he composed. This unique compositional style blurs the lines between the academic and the personal, between intellectual appraisal and emotional reaction, in a provocative and affecting dissolution of traditional binaries. Given the inexhaustibleness of Holocaust literature, one might think an original contribution to the genre is impossible, but Finch’s novel earns the distinction. The profile of Tauber that emerges—always slippery and impressionistic—is, whether real or imagined, tantalizingly complex. Tauber was not a fundamentally political man, and certainly not an enthusiastic disciple of Nazi ideology; the death of his wife Emilie, which may have been a suicide, seemed to impress upon him a moral clarity lost in what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.” The narrator of the story is equally multifaceted, an impressively cultured man with bottomless reserves of erudition stymied by a spiritual ennui. Tauber’s story is one he can move past, but it stirs something in him comparable to the way Emilie’s probable suicide awakened Tauber from his amoral slumber. “Zach was a different story, he was a lifelong tenant, sliding rent checks under my door without so much as a friendly reminder. In death, he was present in ways that he wasn’t in life, a perpetual shadow that danced inside my own.” Among the novel’s many virtues is Finch’s prose, which swings from the lucid rigor of analysis to haunting poetry.

A powerful book, literarily inventive and emotionally poignant.