Filip David and Trans. by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric
RaveThe JCThe central question in this profound and complex short novel is: what is the nature of evil? ... The first of several narrators, Albert Weisz...hears an unnamed stranger argue that Hannah Arendt’s phrase \'banality of evil\' is a dangerously reductive rationalisation. Evil, claims the stranger, cannot be so glibly encapsulated. Evil is incalculable, all-pervasive, metaphysical. All individuals and families — \'indeed entire peoples\' — he argues, have \'a mysterious power watching them, a power called a daemon. It guides them, it saves them or it destroys them\' ... Whether readers will be completely convinced of the implication that incomprehensible evil functions as a (or even the) primary force in human affairs is a moot point; but, at a metaphysical level, such an interpretation of the Holocaust itself remains entirely possible, albeit one that is profoundly discomfiting.
