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Omega Minor
by Paul Verhaeghen
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9781564784773 |
Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)
"Omega Minor is impossible not to admire, whether for its wealth of brilliant descriptive passages, its imaginative and intellectual daring, or its author's ability to juggle thematic and metaphorical motifs. Verhaeghen has written — and translated, from the original Flemish — a novel with a narrow potential audience, but one that will be admired fiercely by readers who value Byzantine plots, stylistic pyrotechnics, and theoretical ambition." John Isaac Lingan, Rain Taxi (read the entire Rain Taxi review)
Synopses & Reviews
Review:
"A sprawling take on the dark legacies of WWII and its aftermath, Verhaeghen's debut follows three main characters: Paul Andermans, a Flemish postdoctoral student in Potsdam in 1995; the shadowy Goldfarb, a German nuclear scientist who now teaches at Andermans's university; and Jozef De Heer, who survived the Holocaust to live a 'meek' existence in reunited 1995 Germany. The book unfolds as De Heer tells his life story to Andermans when the two meet by chance at a local hospital. The book's central conundrum is how De Heer's life as a survivor and refugee relates to that of Goldfarb, who plays a key role, as the narrative shifts 50-plus years backward, in the Manhattan Project and resulting arms race. But Verhaeghen is also after something much bigger: the nature of complicity in the 20th century's grim history. De Heer's Holocaust material has less gravitas than nonfiction accounts, but Verhaeghen's relentless verbal fireworks (lots of alliteration and rhyme) and comic touches (a children's magician masterminds the Berlin Wall's speedy construction) lighten things. As De Heer's and Goldfarb's lives further intertwine, the novel strains to tie together loose ends, but the big convoluted twists and outlandish ending may be part of the point. This is an ambitious, epic literary debut, and it's not surprising that Verhaeghen, in trying to orchestrate a familiar epoch, falls short of Gravity's Rainbow and Underworld." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
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Eric Anderson, January 21, 2008 (view all comments by Eric Anderson)
Fans of the supermassive black hole known as the postmodern novel could easily overlook this quiet debut by a Flemish author, recently published in English in a paperback edition by a non-profit press. That would be a shame, because it stands right alongside the best practitioners of the genre for its layered allusions, dystopian themes, fractured history, and unfettered wordplay. It yokes together a Holocaust survivor memoir, the fragmented psyche of post-reunification Germany, Wagnerian totalities, mathematical singularities, and behavioral science, just for starters. But Verhaeghen also has a symphonic way with prose (he did his own translation), begging comparisons with Wagner’s own masterful ability to combine lyricism, storytelling, and myth into a total experience.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781564784773
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Dalkey Archive Press
- Subject:
- General
- Publication Date:
- November 2007
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 691
- Dimensions:
- 8.98x6.32x1.92 in. 2.22 lbs.
