Ethnic Cleansers By CARYN JAMES

Ethnic Cleansers By CARYN JAMES

September 13, 2009

BRODECK
By Philippe Claudel
Translated by John Cullen
313 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26

“I write novels like a filmmaker, but I write films like a novelist,” Philippe Claudel said when “I’ve Loved You So Long,” his first work as director, appeared last year. The comment couldn’t have meant much to American audiences. To us, that powerful and eloquent movie, with Kristin Scott Thomas as a doctor just released from prison, seemed to come out of nowhere. Although Claudel had long been respected as a novelist in France, only two of his previous books, “By a Slow River” and “Grey Souls,” had been translated into English. Now his latest novel, “Brodeck,” arrives like a fresh, why-haven’t-we-known-him discovery, revealing him to be as dazzling on the page as he is on the screen.
In both works, the central character suffers from survivor’s guilt for a crime that is horrific yet understandable. But the novel’s mythic style couldn’t be more different from the film’s taut psychological realism. “Brodeck” is the Brothers Grimm by way of Kafka. Set in an unnamed, isolated village where people speak their own Germanic dialect, the story is unmistakably about the Holocaust, yet never establishes a specific time or place. Although its characters have a jump-off-the-page cinematic vitality, they are drawn in the broad strokes of a parable (helped by John Cullen’s faithful translation).
The narrator, Brodeck, has been ordered by the village men to write a report about an event that he — and he alone among them — had no part in, the murder of a mysterious stranger. What we are reading is not Brodeck’s official report but a shadow version, a personal account that begins with his knowledge that the townsmen gathered at an inn to kill the stran­ger. Brodeck takes us back to his tortured months in a concentration camp and his return to a community that has retreated to an earlier century, using fireplaces for warmth and plowshares to farm, as if vaulting so far back might erase the evils of the recent past.
Brodeck describes how the stranger entered the village one day — a giant of a man with an odd smile, wearing an old-fashioned embroidered frock coat, leading a donkey. No one new had arrived for years. The townspeople never knew the man’s name, but Brodeck thought of him as “De Anderer,” or “the Other.” Brodeck fearfully tries to write his report, clearly meant to be a coverup and a test of loyalty, and we see he is an Other himself.
He had come to town as a child with the old woman who had adopted him, a cronelike granny straight from a storybook. During the war, he was betrayed by villagers and sent to the camp, where he was kept on a leash and known as Brodeck the Dog. Although unnamed, the World War II setting is precise, from Kristallnacht to the brutal camp scenes that include daily executions witnessed by the commander’s eerily serene wife. Brodeck returns home — his name already on a memorial to the dead — to a town that had com­mitted its own unspeakable evils apart from the war’s. When the Anderer discerns the blackness in the villagers’ hearts and is seen writing in a notebook, the townsmen decide that this journal “mustn’t ever leave the village” and stalk him like Frankenstein’s monster in an old horror movie.
Plot is not Claudel’s strength, and the town’s dark secret will not be much of a surprise. But he audaciously approaches a subject that seems thoroughly covered and makes it fresh. His nightmarish fairy tale captures the essential, inescapable evil at the center of the Holocaust, the human urge to destroy Others — whether the Anderer or people of different ethnicities and religions — a compulsion existing beyond time, place or politics.

Caryn James, the film critic for Marie Claire and a culture critic for The Daily Beast, is the author of the novels “Glorie” and “What Caroline Knew.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/James-t.html