By acknowledging the form’s limitations, Dunthorne’s iteration rises to something genuinely, searingly meaningful ... Poignant ... In Dunthorne’s hands, these disparate moments of bearing witness — sometimes in the most literal way — add up to a remarkable, strange and complicated story, full of the shame and humor a lesser memoir might have avoided.
This grim summary doesn’t remotely convey the experience of reading the book. Dunthorne, a British novelist and poet, has found a tone that is at once predictably appalled and unpredictably amusing, wry, and self-mocking. His animated narrative voice is often funny without ever seeming facile or irreverent, and without trivializing—or losing sight of—the gravity of his subject ... Affecting ... Beneath the book’s lively surface are a number of complex and serious themes: courage, self-delusion, conscience, the unreliability of memory, and the folly of believing romantic family stories about the past ... Remarkable.
Mr. Dunthorne does not reckon with his great-grandfather’s contributions to the Nazi killing machine so much as numbly reveal and record them ... Mr. Dunthorne’s bracing memoir confronts us with a family legacy as unsettling as the warning sign posted outside the fenced-off Orgacid poison factory: 'Risk of death—Do not enter.'
Discursive ... The book’s circuitous, meandering structure...tests the reader’s patience. Epiphanies are sandwiched between near-irrelevancies and reportorial dead ends ... The memoirist wrestles with both his great-grandfather’s complicity and his family’s continuing ties to Germany.
Narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story ... Dunthorne’s voice – affable, warm, wry – casts a spell right from the book’s dedication ... It takes a special writer to generate embarrassment comedy from this material, but you come to feel that Dunthorne is probably the kind of author who is witty in his sleep ... As discoveries and ambiguities mount, the book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice, ceaselessly yo-yoing between potential indictment and mitigation. Dunthorne’s instinctively jokey tone doesn’t minimise the ever-present horror, yet he recognises, too, that the darkest aspects of his story are tricky to separate from the frisson of proximity.
Memoirs written by poets and novelists often have a special charm to them, even when they deal with difficult and painful subjects, and Joe Dunthorne’s book, based on his family’s history, takes this a step further, infusing energy and intensity into the narrative and bringing the reader directly into his remarkable adventure ... Dunthorne’s sensitive handling of this legacy of guilt brings us a searingly honest look inside the minds and hearts of a family with the dark, painful secret of collaboration ... Meticulous prose.
Rueful, determined, and funny, Dunthorne presents a galvanizing and revelatory saga of prickly personalities, desperation, denial, and the overriding drive to survive.
Unusual and very readable ... Compelling ... Dunthorne’s careful attention to detail will hold the reader’s attention as he tries to determine what is true, partially true or false about his family’s past.
He brings a novelist’s eye for detail, character and witty observation to Children of Radium ... The shocking facts he uncovers are not revealed in chronological order (which may have been a little easier for the reader) but in the order Dunthorne discovers them, so limber up for a bit of jumping between timelines ... I started to flag in the later chapters recounting Siegfried’s later life in America ... More about the author’s journey towards accepting the actions of his ancestors than it is about those ancestors. Dunthorne’s dry wit means these elements are still enjoyable but I preferred the sections where he has enough information to bring the world of Siegfried and his family to life.
Excellent ... A powerful exploration of the struggle to separate truth from the stories we want to believe. Dunthorne interrogates not just the omissions and self-deceptions in his great-grandfather’s memoir, but also his own complicated motivations for revisiting his familial past. A triumph of stylish prose, the book tackles dark subject matter with moral precision and a surprisingly keen sense of humour.
Riveting ... Dunthorne strikes a near-perfect balance of history and personal reflection, and his questions about Merzbacher’s moral dilemmas resonate. This is a must-read.
