Thursday, September 21, 2006

Nazi past revisited at the write time

I was just struck by how many people have said how the political climate in the United States has resembled that of Germany in the 1930s. I recently came across the advanced reviews of an incredibly accomplished novel, Variations on the Beast, which is due out later this fall which amazed me in its ability to capture the feeling of the 30s in comparing the meteoric rise of a completely narcissistic self obsessed composer with the advance of the Nazi party and the ultimate disaster of WWII. It raised so many questions about art, power, perversion, genocide and how humanity is pitted against both positive and destructive tendencies. So curious to see what other people think. I've been struck by the fact that so much contemporary fiction seems to be turning inwards and we're largely in an age of more psychological novels, rather than social ones....What's up with that?