Fiction chronicle November 2021
Huis clos
On The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Hard Like Water, by Yan Lianke, Awake, by Harald Voetmann & A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray, by Dominique Barbéris.
With countless Afghans trapped by an extremist regime in a country where they no longer fit, the recent release of a new English edition of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s powerful, angry, and unsettling The Passenger (Der Reisende) was undeniably timely.1
Boschwitz was a German in a period when it was necessary to have parents who passed a malign muster. His mother was a Protestant, as was his late father, Salomon, a successful businessman who had fought in the trenches. In the Third Reich this was not enough. Salomon had been born Jewish. Under the Nazi Nuremberg...
New to The New Criterion?
Subscribe for one year to receive ten print issues, and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism.
Subscribe