…Listening, the narrator analyzes his own reactions with a characteristic detachment that is at once coolly clinical, incantatory and overwrought: “You’re a swine, I thought, not to get up and put an end to this disgusting and disgraceful performance. It did me good to call myself a swine, and at the same time I suffered under it. His story aroused all the fury and hatred hidden within me, I suffered under it and at the same time it did me good to suffer. I could have wept, and at the same time it did me good, like a father who is beating his child with tears in his eyes and experiences the twofold delight of being able to beat it and to suffer under it at the same time.”

With seeming effortlessness, Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, and how naturally extreme intelligence and sensitivity can coexist with obtuseness, denial and self-deception. To say that reading this novel makes it impossible not to understand how so many European Jews underestimated the growing menace of ­Nazism is to acknowledge only a fraction of its range. In fact the novel shows us how human beings, in any place, at any time, protectively shield themselves from the most frightening truths of their private lives and their historical moment.
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Rarely have such harrowing narratives been related with such wry, off-kilter humor, and in so quiet a whisper. Read these books and join me in adding him to the list, which each of us must compose on our own, of the world’s very greatest writers.