This family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.
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.'
