After the fascist takeover of his homeland and the murder of his parents, Jewish architecture student Samuel Zelnik thinks that he and his friends are bound for the gulag—or worse. Instead, he receives an unexpected offer of freedom working in the experimental utopian city of Duma. Awed by the city's dramatic architecture but confused by the other residents' strange behavior, Zelnik searches for his long-lost uncle who emigrated to Duma before him. His wanderings reunite him with Miriana Grannoff, an exiled avant-garde artist who was once his teacher. Her memorial installations hidden around the city equally enchant and repel him. And gradually, they begin to reveal a truth: Duma is not the workers' paradise it pretends to be.
[A] dark political fable ... The novel proceeds along a series of surreal and absurdist interactions ... Solomon is at times too eager to spell out the meanings of his allegory...but the novel builds to a superbly bizarre Götterdämmerung, as Duma’s subterranean terrors come to the surface and utopia shows its true face.
This is, at its heart, a philosophical novel ... If the novel has a weak point, it is that the population of Duma (aside from Zelnik) lacks the resistance to political abuse that one would expect such refugees to exhibit ... Still, it’s a minor concern that’s largely eclipsed by Solomon’s point about the connection between fascism and art. With clear, muscular prose and a world that comes to life in all its strange detail, A Brutal Design is a strong debut from an author with something to say.
The prose is direct ... Like handing over oneself to a psychologically ending experiment ... It is the discomfort Samuel’s experience produces that causes readers to look inward and examine their own attitudes and behaviors.
