Tag: Steve Sem-Sandberg

Six degrees of separation

Six Degrees of Separation: From ‘Stasiland’ to ‘The Other Side of You’

kimbofo

Six degrees of separation logo for memeIt’s been more than nine months since I participated in Six Degrees of Separation. That’s mainly because the months roll by so quickly that I forget to prepare anything! But now that I am working from home and am cooped up indoors all the time (thanks to the coronavirus lockdown) I need distractions – and this is a good one!

Six Degrees of Separation is a book-themed meme hosted by Kate from booksaremyfavouriteand best (read more about it on her blog here). Every month Kate chooses a particular book as a starting point. The idea is then to create a chain by linking to six other books using common themes.

Here’s this month’s #6Degrees. As ever, click the book titles to read my review of that book in full.

The starting point is:

‘Stasiland’ by Anna Funder (2003)
I haven’t read this non-fiction book about life under the Stasi, even though it has been sitting in my TBR for about a decade. I even brought it with me from London when I repatriated last year as I had planned to read it for #20booksofsummer. Alas, I never got around to it. Another book that is about life behind the Berlin Wall is…

‘The Wall Jumper’ by Peter Schneider (1982)
This classic German novel provides a fascinating glimpse of Berlin life before the wall came down. It follows the lives of a handful of East Berliners who move to the West and is narrated by someone who regularly crosses the border to visit family and friends. It’s fiction but feels very much like reportage. Another novel that feels like reportage is…

‘The Emperor of Lies’ by Steve Sem-Sandberg (2012)
A densely written and meticulously detailed novel, it is based on the factual story of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, a 63-year-old Jewish businessman, who was the leader of the Jewish ghetto in Łódź during the Second World War. Rumkowski was a mysterious figure with murky morals: many believed he was a Nazi pawn content to do as the Germans wanted in order to save his own skin and fulfil his quest for power during the Holocaust. Another Holocaust novel is…

‘Sophie’s Choice’ by William Styron (1979)
Set in Brooklyn immediately after the Second World War, this 635-page novel follows a trio of characters living in a boarding house, one of whom is an Auschwitz survivor. This imminently readable but problematic (for me) novel follows what happens to Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Catholic, after the war — and it isn’t always pretty. Another novel that looks at what happens to an Auschwitz survivor after the war is…

‘This Place Holds No Fear’ by Monika Held (2015)
This extraordinarily beautiful novel looks at the marriage between a German translator and a man 10 years her senior who survived Auschwitz where he had been sent in 1942 because he was a Communist. This is an unusual Holocaust novel because it explores what happens to the survivors afterward — how do they get on with their lives after such unfathomable horror and trauma? Another book about trauma is…

‘Trauma’ by Patrick McGrath (2009)
A Manhattan-based psychiatrist who is still coming to terms with the break-up of his marriage seven years earlier is the star of this short novel. Even though he treats patients who have gone through traumatic events, he seems largely unable to confront his own demons. Another book starring a psychiatrist is…

‘The Other Side of You’ by Salley Vicker (2007)
The relationship between a psychiatrist and his patient, a woman who has attempted suicide, is the focus of this compelling novel. It looks at how trust grows between them over time and shows that even those people who we think are stable and normal are often nursing hidden pain. The moral of the story is that we never really know the people we are closest to and shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

So that’s this month’s #6Degrees: from an award-winning non-fiction book about life behind the Iron Curtain to a story about the delicate relationship between a psychiatrist and his patient. They all explore dark subjects but are done with care and sensitivity. Have you read any of these books? 

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Faber and Faber, Fiction, holocaust, literary fiction, Poland, Publisher, Setting, Steve Sem-Sandberg

‘The Emperor of Lies’ by Steve Sem-Sandberg

kimbofo

Emperor-of-lies

Fiction – paperback; Faber and Faber; 664 pages; 2012. Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death.

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies won the August Prize — the Swedish equivalent of the Booker Prize — in 2009 and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012.

It is a dense behemoth of a book, with nary a chink of light in its dark fictionalised account of the Holocaust, but I read it at a time when I was looking for something substantial to get my teeth into. At more than 650 tiny print-filled pages, it certainly fit the bill. It is by no means a light or easy read, but it is one that rewards the patient reader.

Based on a true story

The book is based on the factual story of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, a 63-year-old Jewish businessman, who was the leader of the Jewish ghetto in Łódź. The ghetto — the second largest in Poland — was established by the Nazis in February 1940. Its 200,000 inhabitants were forced to work gruelling hours  — and in impoverished conditions marked by constant hunger, cold and fear — to provide supplies for the German military.

Chaim, who was also known as “Eldest of the Jews” after the Nazis appointed him to the role, was a mysterious figure with murky morals: was he, as many believed, a Nazi pawn, content to do as the Germans wanted in order to save his own skin and fulfil his quest for power? Or was he acting in the misguided belief that if he turned the ghetto into a well-oiled machine for military production he would not only save the lives of those Jews who worked for him but convince the Third Reich that Jews were not the vermin they were thought to be. In other words, was he a sinner or a saint?

The book, which explores this question in exacting, sometimes overwhelming, always meticulous, detail, fictionalises Chaim’s life and the lives of those who lived among him, but it does not provide a definitive answer (although the title might hint at the author’s opinion). What it does is make the reader see the man in all his many facets — some of it good, much of it bad — and leaves you to come to your own conclusions.

Problematic but still powerful

The problem I have with a book of this nature is not knowing what is real and what is not. If it is based on fact and historical research — and the appendices suggest Sem-Sandberg has devoted considerable time in this pursuit — why not write a straight non-fiction book so it’s perfectly clear? Why fictionalise something and then write it in such a way — very dry, prosaic and “journalistic” — that it reads like authoritative non-fiction reportage?

The answer, I suspect, is that the author would find it difficult to bring in the view points of the vast array of characters at the heart of this novel, all of whom were based on real people. (The book is littered with eye witness accounts.) Indeed, there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep track of them (though the guide at the back is helpful), and because it is written from so many perspectives it’s difficult to identify with any one person. I often felt like I’d just got to “know” someone, and then the story switched to a different character and I would have to start afresh, as it were.

This might sound like I am being negative, but I have to admit that I found The Emperor of Lies a truly fascinating and absorbing read. It tends to plod along, but I appreciated the detail and the way in which Sem-Sandberg examines Chaim’s moral culpability. It’s crammed with information but is also very nuanced and moving, so that the weight of the emotion builds slowly and by the final page you feel absolutely shattered. When Chaim sacrifices the elderly and the children of the ghetto to save the working population, it comes as quite a shock. And when you know the fate of those that are disappearing — many were murdered in Auschwitz and Chelmo — when they do not, it is extremely distressing.

Although The Emperor of Lies is a problematic novel, it is also one of the most powerful I have ever read.

You can read more about the real life Chaim Rumkowski on wikipedia (though the articles seems almost as contentious as the person it’s about). And there’s a terrific review — or should I say hatchet job — on the Financial Times website. There’s a more positive take on it in The Independent.