Excellent. ( )

Started out great, compelling storyline held my interest in the beginning(novel is told from multiple points of view of characters at a death camp during WW II), but considerably slowed and became scattered and trivialized halfway through. I felt the descriptions of sex and sexualized descriptions of body parts were gratuitous and not relevant other than that of perhaps Doll's, but even there his preoccupation with describing his wife was unnecessary and did not add to the story - same with other male characters. I didn't feel Hannah's character was fleshed out enough, throughout. I did like that it didn't have a tidy, happy ending. ( )

As WWII starts going bad for the Germans, Nazi soldiers running the concentration camps and ovens handle the inevitable defeat in various ways. Drinking excessively, chasing women, embracing the cruelty, ignoring the obvious, helping to hasten the defeat.

Paul Doll, commandant of a camp is all-in on the gassing and cruelty. His wife Hannah understandably hates him. Everyone does. A junior officer, Thomsen, uselessly falls in love with Hannah Doll while trying to undermine her husband.

The casual institutional inhumanity of the Nazis and the camps in particular serves to underscore the horror of the atrocities inflicted upon millions. ( )

A shocking and memorable read - as horrible a story as you can imagine, but you just keep on reading it ti see what happens. One of the amazing things it portrays is the complete dissassociation by the Nazis of what they were actually doing - the dissasociation of the people who perpetrated the crimes from the actual human cost which was clear as day, and being actively ignored. . It comes as no surprise that many were consuming large quantities of drugs like methamphetamine, while drinking heavily to overcome the vestiges of guilt (and to ignor the ongoing defeat which at the time of the novel's action is clear) that might have seeped through. A focus on the relationship of a German officer and the wife of the camp commandant serves to highlight the incomprehensible discord between what was going on and how it was actually percieved by the instigators. Also of note are the many passages which use puns, and other language humor (actually turns out to be horrible, inexcuusable black humor in this case) in modalities, in counterpoint to the war crimes, the effect is to amplify the horrible monstrosities of operation of the camps - masking them as everyday business for the Reich. ( )

This is a difficult book. It's about the holocaust. Amis is one of my favorite living writers, but I struggled all the way through this novel. ( )