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.
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.
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.
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.
