Displaced Minds (Published 2009)

I’ve read a lot of books, but nothing quite like this one. An attempt to use the instruments of 20th-century literature to depict the dislocations of spirit and consciousness caused by the genocide against the Jews, its style could be called Holocaust modernism, an improbable formulation if ever there was one.

H. G. Adler’s fate was as unusual as his art. Born in Prague in 1910, he failed to flee before the Nazi takeover and ended up in Theresienstadt, where, as he later wrote in a monograph about the “showcase” camp, “illusion flourished wildly, and hope, only mildly dampened by anxiety, would eclipse everything that was hidden under an impenetrable haze.” Adler spent two and a half years there with his family. Later, in Auschwitz, his wife decided to accompany her mother to the gas chambers so she wouldn’t have to die alone. In all, Adler lost 18 members of his family, including his own mother and father.

By luck, he was saved. Witnessing the Soviet takeover of Prague and wishing to take no further chances, he fled to London, where he married a childhood sweetheart, fathered a son and produced 26 books. “The Journey,” which was written in the early 1950s, is the first of his six novels to be translated into English.

Though Adler had his admirers — Elias Canetti called “The Journey” a “masterpiece” — he achieved little renown in Europe before his death in 1988. Part of Adler’s problem was the prevailing post-war view, formulated by the philosopher Theodor Adorno, that after Auschwitz literature was impossible. Adler corresponded with Adorno, clashing passionately with this view and arguing that literature was now more necessary than ever. Not, he conceded, that the Holocaust could ever be understood. But as the character in “The Journey” who, like the author, survives everything says: “You don’t have to understand. There’s nothing to understand. You only have to know it because it’s simply what happened. We were no longer allowed to exist, and now my dearest ones are dead!”

The novel follows the members of a family, the Lustigs, something like Adler’s, as they journey through the Holocaust to a place something like Theresienstadt. It ends with a lone survivor wandering in the immediate postwar landscape of rubble and displaced persons. But the book’s real subject is the displacement of minds thrust into the ultimate meaninglessness.

Adler’s prose seeks to catch the whispers and chirpings of insanity rather than the lamentations of suffering. To this end, the narrative voice changes continually, and so seamlessly and logically that at first the reader can even fail to notice it. Adler will shift from a description of the Nazis, usually referred to with deadpan irony as “heroes,” to the Nazis’ own voices speaking to their victims: “Like little children, everything has to be done for you, though you arrive at the dinner table without uttering the slightest thank you.”

The mundane and the surreal collide in a bizarre sort of logic. “But you don’t take along coffins on a journey,” people are told when they start dying en route to the camps. “It’s much too costly and the freight is not worth the trouble.” Adler is perfectly capable of minting sentences that could be placed in an anthology of aphorisms — “Sorrow is slight when vanity is not allowed to adorn it” — but the true purpose of such sentences is only to heighten the dimension of insanity, to further convey the “impenetrable haze.”

The novel’s streaming consciousness and verbal play invite comparison with Joyce, the individual-dwarfing scale of law and prohibition brings Kafka to mind, and there is something in the hypnotic pulse of the prose that is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. But the book falters when it fails to maintain the fine line between trance and tedium, especially in the longer abstract passages. The reader is required at all times to pay complete attention, otherwise the thread of the narrative may be lost, along with a sense of who is speaking (registered through the tone of voice, which is often light and mocking). Though generally strong, Peter Filkins’s translation from the German sometimes breaks the hypnotic spell by introducing anachronistic Americanisms — “critters”; “no pain, no gain”; “just go with the flow.”

But it ultimately doesn’t matter whether the attention wanders because of shortcomings in the text, the translation or the reader. In the end, you are always pulled back into Adler’s flickering black-and-white landscape of rubbish and rubble, where a person is only “a bit of madness who happens to have a name.”

Yet despite its grim setting, this is not a book of hopelessness and meaninglessness. “The truth is merciless, . . . always victorious,” Adler informs us, pointing the way to a means of surviving the worst that history can throw at people: “One must have a center, an unshakable quiet space that one clings to vigorously, even when one is in the middle of the journey, the unavoidable journey.”