User Profile

The details of Joseph Debreczeni’s journey into the hell of Auschwitz are excruciating. Yet Debreczeni, a poet and journalist prior to his enslavement by the Nazis, recreates his unimaginable year with a visceral, furious grace. “Horror is always kitsch. Even when it’s real,” he writes, one of the most starkly powerful lines I’ve seen in decades of reading. He writes of standing in the rain for hours, watching other prisoners beaten to death, of being sentenced underground prior to being transferred to the cold crematorium of the title. Once there, his joints swollen from starvation edema, he lies crammed into a filthy, louse-infested bunk in a freezing barracks. Somehow, he survives for months as liberation slowly works it way to the camp.

Knowing that Debreczeni obviously survived to write the memoir powered my reading with a kind of white-knuckled hope. His time in hell would end, I knew that, even as I marveled that he could survive at all, that anyone could. And through it, he carefully observes small details and large, showing the glimmers of humanity that refused to extinguish even in the darkest of hours. Writing my own life at the moment, I have a special admiration for the courage and stubbornness it had to have taken him to relive and record his experiences. We are better for having them, and thanks to Paul Olchváry’s translation, to have such a powerful sense of Debreczeni’s poetic and journalistic voice, which fuse into a narrative that flows like molten metal, all the more remarkable given its grim subject matter.

Three sisters who don't particularly get along in a future metropolis--feeling like there was a London-ish vibe?--where everyone has to keep moving to higher floors of skyscrapers to escape the constantly rising water due to neverending rain. I love me some mournful apocalypse, and what I appreciated about this one was the inexorability of the rain combined with the way people know they're doomed, yet somehow they just keep finding through another day. There's a constant sense that, even as they know the rain will never stop, they keep thinking maybe it will...

I rather cluelessly did not register the King Lear quote that begins the book; it's not the famous and expected one ("blow wind! crack your cheeks" etc) but I ended up rereading the book through that lens once a reviewer pointed it out. It's beautifully written and I liked taking extra time with it for that reason, because as a reviewer here has noted, the pacing is excellent and I really wanted to know how things ended up, so didn't quite soak it up. First book I can remember with a they/them major character (other than the theyby in Miranda July's All Fours), which was an interesting experience reading wise; probably because of my generation, I found myself, despite myself, continually trying to gender the character, another reason I wanted to read it again. All in all, while I didn't love it, i find myself thinking about the world created and the characters often, so it gets the fourth star for that.

One quibble I had was that there was still at the least chicory if not actual coffee for one of the characters to work as a barista. I kept wondering, where are they getting the milk? What happens to food supply in a world where the rain never stops? So that interrupted my reading a bit.

As an aside, I had recently watched Bad Sisters and couldn't help casting the three sisters similar to the show, although the show has five so I found myself flipping around a bit, which was actually kind of fun.