In Paradise: A Novel

Peter Matthiesen's title comes from an apocryphal version of the Crucifixion story. Where in the Bible Christ promises the repentant thief hanging on the cross beside him, 'Thou shalt be with me this day in Paradise,' in this version "Christ shakes his head in pity, saying, 'You are in Paradise RIGHT NOW'." Strange to think that the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where Matthiesen's novel is set, could ever be thought of as Paradise; did not John Paul II, the first Polish Pope, call this site Golgotha, after the Place of the Skull, where Christ was crucified? Yet one of the characters in the novel, a young Polish nun, has also mentioned the teaching of St. Catherine of Siena, her namesake: "All the way to Heaven is Heaven." In other words, that the journey to Paradise is Paradise itself, however unspeakable the stations on the way.

Beginning my review with this obscure paradox of Christian theology, I am reflecting a couple of key points about Matthiesen's magnificent book. First, that a lot of it consists of philosophical discussion, sometimes gentle, sometimes angry; this is not a novel you read primarily for plot or even for character. Secondly, a Holocaust novel with as many gentile characters as Jewish ones is rather unusual. The occasion is an ecumenical retreat organized in 1996, where participants of many faiths would camp out in the empty buildings of Auschwitz, meditate, and bear witness. There are a few very old Jewish survivors, some Rabbis, and several from later generations who have lost family members. There are a number of Germans, including some whose parents served with the SS. The leader of the retreat is one of several Buddhists. There are two Catholic nuns and one older Polish priest; almost as significant a topic as the Shoah itself is the question of the complicity of the Catholic Church in allowing it to happen. When the priest offers an anodyne prayer of reconciliation on the selection ramp at Birkenau, the young nun breaks ranks to prostrate herself in apology to the murdered on behalf of her fellow Christians.

Fifty years on, as Matthiesen recognizes, the Shoah may already be losing its power as a cautionary lesson. One of his most brilliant strokes to prevent the easy reiteration of philosophical platitudes is to introduce an utterly objectionable character, going by the name of G. Earwig, whose offensive and occasionally obscene interjections nonetheless contain a grain of truth. He may owe a debt to what Francine Prose did in the Auschwitz novella in her GUIDED TOURS OF HELL. But an even greater one, as one fellow reviewer has pointed out, to Homer and Shakespeare's Thersites and his scabrous comments on the Trojan War.

Against him, he sets the protagonist, the rational non-believer, American poet and academic Clements Olin. His Protestant grandparents, minor Polish aristocracy with an estate near the original Oswiecim, emigrated to the US before the War, but there are still personal family mysteries he hopes to uncover. It is interesting to see the effect the terrible place has upon this detached observer with no personal connection that he knows about, other than an accident of family history. It is also interesting to see how his responses to others in the group become personalized, in one case leading to an inappropriate erotic attraction. I am not sure that Matthiesen knew how to run to ground all the hares he started with this character, and there are a few loose ends. But this at first detached character ends up as the one giving the novel its greatest humanity.

The final image of the book is a modern stained-glass window in the Franciscan Church in Krakow. Google it (I'll give the link in a comment); like the novel itself, it is both terrible and transcendent.

I read The Snow Leopard while travelling in Nepal in my early 20's and it had a profound effect. Thirty years later a very different book by the same author has impacted in a similar way. Multiple valid perspectives are given powerful expression including the manifestation of what we label as evil. The author articulates the mystery, joy and despair of being human while taking the reader on the collective developmental journey of the human race in its' efforts to transcend the fear generated from an " us and them" mentality, epitomised in the Nazi regime and supported less openly by other european nationalities at the time.

IN PARADISE was Peter Matthiessen's last book, and a fitting last chapter for a deeply spiritual man. Set in Auschwitz fifty years after the war, the story follows D. Clements Olin, 55, an American academic and scholar whose field of expertise is the Shoa, i.e. the Holocaust, who is attending an ecumenical pilgrimage at the infamous Polish death camp. The retreat's participants - more than a hundred - are survivors, perpetrators and others, from more than a dozen countries, including nuns, priests, rabbis, Buddhists, monks and more. Olin's own story, and his connections to Poland - and Auschwitz - unfold gradually as he observes the others and becomes especially interested in a young Catholic novice nun. The story is steeped in the elements of guilt, shame, repentance and a search for forgiveness, with the Holocaust and its horrific history at the center. Indeed, the book's title comes from the story of Jesus forgiving the thief crucified next to him, and telling him, This day you shall be with me "in Paradise." Yet Matthiessen also tells us of an alternate version suggesting that Jesus may have actually told the man that " THIS is paradise" - a much darker interpretation of what comes next.

Matthiessen alludes more than once to the work of Holocaust survivors, especially Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski (THIS WAY TO THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN), the latter being the subject of a monograph written by his protagonist Professor Olin. I remember reading Borowski's book decades ago in college but hadn't remembered that, at age 28, he'd committed suicide (head in a gas oven), shortly after the book was published.

IN PARADISE is obviously not a happily-ever-after kind of book. But it is beautifully written and filled with wisdom about the human animal and what he is capable of, both good and evil. Very highly recommended for lovers of serious literary fiction.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Peter Matthiessen's latest and regrettably last book of fiction relates the experience of one Polish-American professor at a so-called "Death Camp" retreat in 1996. Clements Olin travels to Poland ostensibly on a research gathering quest for a book about a survivor who later committed suicide. But his more important purpose is only slowly revealed, to the reader and to himself, by novel's end.

Once in Auschwitz, he joins a varied crew of 'witnesses', each with their own reason for being there. Among them are relatives of the victims, says Ben Lama, the retreat's guide, "...others are stricken descendants of the 'perpetrators.'" Though Olin admires Lama's lack of pretension, he is dubious of the sentimental New Age language being bandied about amid the participants. "Words like 'closure' and 'healing' and 'confronting the Nazi within.'" make him wince. "As for 'bearing witness,' the term strikes his ear as anachronistic and over-earnest." "Witness to what, exactly?", Olin ponders. "The emptiness? The silence?"

Searching for what he thinks is simply silence, Olin enters the gateway tunnel of Birkenau Camp. As he makes his way through the dark passage, it reminds him of a somewhat arcane medieval folktale: "the Ogre's Cave, he thinks queerly, Glob the Ogre". There he meets G. Earwig, the cynic of the bunch, in fact he resembles a squat, grumbling ogre himself. Earwig, as befits his name, suggests to Olin the real purpose of the professor's journey to this evil place, drills the truth directly into Olin's head.

"That why you came all the way to f*ing Poland? To hear silence? Bullsh*t. You want to hear lost voices, right? Like all the rest of 'em"

With In Paradise, Matthiessen probes this hallowed ground thoroughly; from all points of view with his rootless protagonist observing it all from the center. But when the professor is inevitably attracted to one of the young novices housed in the convent just outside of the camp, he relinquishes his voyeuristic role and becomes drawn into the mounting emotional tension at the retreat. By forcing the main character to disinter some of his long-buried secrets, Matthiessen excavates a monstrous necropolis just below the surface of our collective pathos.

Peter Matthiessen's novel In Paradise is the story of an academic Clements Olin, 55, divorced, childless, who feels compelled to attend a Nazi death camp in Poland where he bears witness to a variety of "pilgrims": professors, gurus, guilt-ridden survivors, and religious followers of all stripes. Ostensibly they are there to "come to terms" with evil, to bear witness to evil (so that it never happens again) and in some sense to undergo arduous suffering as a collective penance for a human race that allowed the Holocaust to happen. Instead, we witness people behaving in petty, bombastic, and narcissistic ways, many trying to out-suffer the next or assert their superior theory of evil.

Our weary hero Clements Olin finds this death camp to be a catalyst for unraveling his dark, tortured past in which he must make discoveries about his family in Poland, and his origins, that the reader should discover on his or her own.

Olin's obsession throughout the novel is a book by Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Borowski titled This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Borowski committed suicide because in the aftermath of surviving the Holocaust existence for him became insufferably absurd. Olin is fighting for his own ability to affirm life and escape life's inescapable absurdities and we find him thawing out in the death camp assembly, warming up, every so slightly, to some of the other pilgrims he meets, offering him a sliver of hope that maybe he can go on.

From a stylistic point, the novel's prose is taut and muscular and reminds me in style of J.M. Coetzee's masterpiece Disgrace. Both novels, incidentally, are about 240 pages.

For a novel that addresses the way we react to something as unspeakable as the Holocaust with a story about a well-rounded character fighting for his soul and one written in impeccable prose, In Paradise deserves the highest recommendation.

In this his last work, Matthiessen has taken on the the overwhelming burden of writing about the Shoah. As his characters approach a meditation retreat at Auschwitz, Matthiessen has made clear his understanding that no one who was not imprisoned there can possibly write the truth. Dr. Olsen has traveled to Poland to find the truth of his mother who vanished in the war. His family has told him, "You have no memory of this place, and our won memories are sad." Yet he perseveres along with the other innately flawed humans in his group.

What to do with the knowledge that "The best of us did not return." Survivors remain tainted by their own self guilt. Matthiessen has crafted a blinding work unflinchingly asking questions that no one really wants to answer. He does so without imparting the taint of bigotry even while questioning those who did not intervene, those who assisted, and those who actively forget. In the echoing Jewish Quarter near the camp, the kitschy tourism combined with the almost total lack of Jews themselves begs the question of complicity.

Soon all the survivors will have died, and those who conspire to minimize or to deny the Shoah will have only those like Matthiessen to stand forward and tell the story as bleakly and as honestly as can be born. In his craft, he takes the horror from a shivering monstrosity to a story that must be faced, and faced often. This small group at the core of this astounding work may not perhaps be able to bear witness, but they have come to face it. Their brilliantly dimensional characters bring us to the iron gates in order to ponder what to do now.

Socrates, via Plato, is usually credited with the headline above. I found "In Paradise" to be my life exam and I flunked.

I brought my own prejudices to this book. I have read two of Matthiessen's non-fiction books, when they were first published and found both deeply rewarding. "Snow Leopard" has helped me understand the present political and religious conflicts in Tibet. I read "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" when it came out. Unhappily it was a public library copy and it was legally yanked off the market before I could decide to open my wallet and buy a copy. The controversy around that book taught me much about how the real world deals with the free market of ideas. (I did finally buy a copy)

As a college freshman in a tiny liberal arts college in the midwest in 1957 I sat through about five hours of film made by German Nazi officials and used as evidence in the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. The professor sponsoring this experience never did it again because his source, the public information office of the U.S Fifth Army, decided it was not good for German-American relations to offer them to the American public. I came away from these films with the firm opinion that it was not Nazi or German who did this things, but human beings just like me and I must live my life in a way that would not permit my fellow beings to do anything like this again.

"In Paradise" is a fictional account of about 140 people who in 1996 spend a fortnight in the death camp that is now generally known as Auschwitz. They gather to spend time in historical review and contemplation. The group includes many nationalities and religions.
The narrator is an American academic, Clements Olin, who is an expert on the literary products of the extermination camps. His family were Polish nobility who fled to England and then America before the war started. His father was an officer in the Polish army and stayed to fight. His mother was not of the nobility and was lost. Somehow his grandparents ransomed Clement to America. His father was killed as an enemy of the German state there in the town of Birkenau before the extermination complex was constructed.

Early in the book Clements says "fresh insight into the horror of the camps is inconceivable, and interpretation by anyone lacking direct personal experience an impertinence." Matthiessen's own life seems to be one of privilege among the cultural elite of American New England. He never says he is bringing fresh insight to this horror.

And yet. Various individuals speak out with various personal views. At one evening meal Clements listens to the responses of that day's experience by a Rabbi, a Roman Catholic Sister, a Survivor and thinks to himself, "But there it is, the fatal question confronting many survivors like an arched scorpion taut on the doorsill. Five years, you say? Not so fast, madame. Pray tell us, how did you manage to survive so long? And at what cost to others?"

In 1963 I walked the streets of Sarajevo, Yugoslavia as a tourist. In 1992 I did nothing as those streets were turned into a free-fire zone. In 1994 I did nothing as the genocide by match and machete proceeded in Rwanda. Matthiessen has forced me to examine my own life now that I am 75 and the question is what my survival has cost my soul as part of this contemporary humanity that has converted much of the planet into a carnal house. What Clements cannot forgive is that even after the war, none of his family made any effort to trace his mother.

Peter Matthiessen is gone, dead just before this book was released for publication. I believe the world is a better place because of what he has written.
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In Paradise is a difficult novel to review because it's not so much about its plot line as about the complicated and painful memories and feelings events narrated in the book raise in the breast of the protagonist. It is riveting fiction but its intent seems not so much to tell a story as to make the readers think ---and feel--about the events that unfold in it. The plot is stark and simple: Clement Olins, of Polish descent, is an American academic -he's writing a book on Tadeusz Borowski, the talented and tormented Polish writer who wrote This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1949) and two years later, stuck his head in an oven and gassed himself. In the words of one critic, the stories in Borowski's book is about `the morally numbing effect of everyday terror." In the concentration camps, everyone was complicit. It was the only way to survive.

In Matthiesen's novel, the last one he wrote before he died, Olin joins a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. He's not quite sure why but it has to do both with his scholarly interest in Borowski -why did he commit suicide just at the point when his life seemed again to mean something?--and his own family history -his mother may have perished in Auschwitz and she may have, may have not, been a Jew. His fellow pilgrims include penitent Germans (their fathers and grandfathers worked there), Poles (how do they feel about Jews even now?), Jews, Christians (including two novice nuns), a Catholic priest and a renegade monk, a few scholars, and one weird, negative, abrasive maybe-Jew named G. Earwig, who, bursting with rage and cynicism, spends his time at the retreat deflating others' self-serving myths and excuses about the place. There is a linear sequence of events but they serve more to open up Olin's mind and feelings about this dreadful place than to move events and people from place 1 to 2 to 3 etc. Olin muses at one point, "even horror becomes wearisome," but it doesn't, not in this hand grenade of a book. Horror, instead, and grief and shame simply find new vessels for expression, as each previous vessel proves inadequate for the experience of the Shoah. In the process, explanation after explanation and expiatory attempt after expiatory attempt go by, but the experience -the raw experience of the Holocaust- defeats them all. This is a book -like Borowski's, like Primo Levi's on the concentration camp experience- that transcends reason. It leaves us without excuse or resolution. It's meant to leave us feeling uncomfortable.

If there is one person in this book who rises above guilt, it is the Catholic nun-novitiate Catherine, already in the eye of the Church for having had the effrontery to advocate for a larger role in the Church for women priests. She isn't pretty (probably not), she isn't sexy in any ordinary sense of the word but Olin is enamored of her. With great effort, he pulls back from her. As much as he wants to be with her, he doesn't want to be her seducer. The not-quite love affair between Catherine and Clement is lovingly and subtly told, and is another reason to admire this eloquent book.

If there is a message in this wrenching book, it's probably that we need to realize what kind of animal we are, and how evil we can be, before we can accept -and love--ourselves. We won't get there by forgetting our past.

Not surprisingly “In Paradise” isn’t a comfort read. The holocaust of World War II still haunts us. As always Matthiessen writes beautifully, evocatively, but he raises more questions rather than supplying answers. A group of unconnected people gather together at the site of Auschwitz to witness and discuss what happened there and how it affected them and their families. There are Catholics, Jews, Germans, Poles, Americans, Buddhists, etc. Even the desired outcome of this gathering can be disputed. Are they there to justify what happened, explain it, apportion blame, understand how and why it happened? It’s set in the late 90’s or fifty years after the horror ended so only a few older people remember the Holocaust first hand and then only as children.

I know we’ve all heard ‘there aren’t any easy answers’ but Mattiessen may be saying there are no answers at all, only the ability to witness, not to forget. That is what makes us human and gives us the ability to heal. Maybe we’re still beyond words concerning the holocaust. The pain is too great. We haven’t and shouldn’t forget it. Matthiessen’s ending seems to indicate that the best we can do is to care for the people in our lives now.

Currently I am the 38th person to review Peter Matthiessen's new book, "In Paradise: A Novel". The reviews have been universally excellent; most are as good as the book itself. I can't possibly add anything to the "conversation", other to ask why Peter Mattheissen chose this subject for his last book.

Peter Matthiessen died earlier this month. His NYT obituary makes a point about his practice of Zen meditation. "In Paradise" is about a Zen retreat in the mid-1990's to the Auschwitz/Birkenau Concentration Camp outside Crakow. The main character, a professor named D Clements Olin, is participating in the retreat, though he doesn't appear to practice Zen. Neither do a number of other retreat participants; the group is a mix of Germans, Buddhists, Jews, Catholic Poles, and other assorted people. Everybody in the group seem to be there for different reasons, most of the reasons known only to each participant. Clements Olin is there to write about and...search a bit for his own past. He is Polish by birth, and was sent to live in safety in the United States right after his birth in the late 1930's. His mother was left behind in Osweisem and was never heard from again. He had been raised by his father and grandparents in Boston.

Clements Olin is by this time of his life at sixes and sevens. Not successful in love, he is respected by his teaching colleagues, but he has very little personal life. Is he hoping to find some clue to his identity by trying to find what happened to his mother? Possibly, probably. (Certainly another man attending was trying to find out his own real name; having separated from his family at a young age, this old man searching and searching...) The others attending the retreat are a bit "stock" figures; angry Israelis, anti-Semitic Polish religious, fighting feminists. But Clements Olin is not a "stock" figure. I think he's Peter Mattheissen or someone he knew. (That is obviously speculation on my part...)

The story covers a week or so, beginning with Olin's arrival in Crakow and his missing the bus taking the group to Auschwitz, where the retreat is being held. He gets a ride from a young Polish couple, who are innocent about what happened in their country a mere 50 years before. Clements (whose unused first name is "David") mixes with the other participants at lectures and workshops. (Mattheissen's descriptions of these events are written with a bit of a wry sense of humor.) He meets a young Catholic nun who he fancies himself attracted to. He argues with some other participants but only when he tries to find his mother - he has an old picture of her - do I get the sense that he awakens to his surroundings.

Peter Mattheissen has written a beautiful last book. His main character is a man at a loss, who may be helped by his participating in the retreat at Auschwitz. Or maybe he wasn't helped. The end of the book was a bit ambiguous; and maybe that's how life is.

"The only way to understand such evil is to reimagine it. And, as Goya knew, the only way to reimagine it is through art."

In this novel, D. Clements Olin -- born in Poland, raised in America, now a scholar specializing in "survivor texts" -- is in the midst of a book project on writer Tadeusz Borowski, who memorialized his experiences at Auschwitz and, tragically, committed suicide six years after liberation. To better understand writers like Borowski, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Primo Levi, Olin joins a spiritual retreat convened on the grounds of Auschwitz.

It's a very short novel; the pages fly with lovely language and descriptions that put the reader at Auschwitz. But I found myself letting the book sit, rather than picking it up to read. To make a comparison: I may be one of few people who didn't like the film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; it seemed more a series of dry philosophical debates than a story. Well, this book felt very much the same. As in the quote above, Matthiessen felt he needed to write it as fiction, but it reads like an essay. Its group of stereotypical (and mostly unlikeable) characters just debate a series of heated topics, among them whether Germans should feel guilt; whether Jews were passive and co-responsible; whether there's any place for Holocaust commerce (art, literature, tourism). Emotion comes into the book through two sub-plots, but one left me unsatisfied and the other annoyed me.

I liked the language enough that I'll likely try an earlier novel by Matthiessen. If you do decide to read this one, I recommend doing so in as close to a single sitting as possible.

I had thought that everything that could be said about the genocide at the hands of the Third Reich and others in 1940s Europe, had been said. I was wrong. I might not have chosen this book on the basis of its subject, but I did select it on the basis in my faith in Peter Matthiessen. I hadn't opened it before I heard of his death. The author wrote in such a satisfying manner that for me, he combines the best of the classical writing of the nineteenth century with the best and most progressive work of the twentieth. In Paradise is exactly that. While it is the intricate and absorbing story of an American academic attending a gathering of religious and philosophers at Auschwitz, it is in the main character's piercing search for belonging in that most grotesque of settings, that raises this work to the highest levels of introspective writing. His search is our search for answers. How can we as a species, be capable of such levels of evil? What is there, lying within us, that assigns the murder of innocents as a potential possible action? Does a place that has seen true evil done, radiate that evil for all time afterwards? The author's conclusion is disquieting and ultimately brings little comfort. At times, I detested the emotions that were brought to the foreground in the reading, but mostly, as much as I intellectually wanted to, I could not lay it down. I've read most of Matthiessen's work, both fiction and non-fiction, and this is a more than fitting coda for his volume of work. Add a star if you feel an acute need to immerse yourself in unsolvable, disconnected guilt and loss. or if you yourself, have a deep need to know more of who you are. In any case, this is a book that will help keep the author's name in discussion for a long time to come.

Matthiessen is a Buddhist priest and spiritual teacher, but if you pick up this book expecting New Age advice, mantras and koans, you will be shockingly surprised. The novel deals with a group of 100+ people of diverse nationality and religion who assemble for a week-long meditation retreat at Auschwitz. (The author made such a retreat in 1995.) Each has his or her own reasons for participating. Meditation is during the day on the railroad ramps where the Jews were unloaded on their way to the ovens. In the evening, those who care to do so speak about their experiences, both in the present setting and in their prior lives. At times the air becomes charged with hostility, contempt, hatred, and brutal honesty. On at least one other occasion the auditorium is charged with an uncanny joy ("Dancing at Auschwitz").

The entire novel consists of describing the relationships among these people. As ever, Matthiessen uses the English language with a mastery rarely matched. This is his last book; he died two days before its publication. One previous the store reviewer called it "the most boring book I've ever read"; others, including me, were stunned with its impact. I wanted to finish the book and start over at the beginning immediately (something I've never done before). Words can't describe the effect it had on me, but it's a fitting finale to an illustrious literary career.

I have heard wonderful things about Matthiessen’s writing for a while now, but this is actually the first book of his that I have read. Set in 1996, a professor born in Poland returns for the first time to the country of his birth and takes part in a multi-faith spiritual retreat held within Auschwitz. It is an interesting novel with a surprisingly disparate cast of characters who all come together for various reasons to take part in this retreat. Olin’s narration and views are easy to identify with and though the book is more character-driven than plot-driven, the books moves along at a fast pace - helped by the nearly flawless writing. I wish that this book had been published earlier - in college I took a class on 20th Century Genocide and the Holocaust and this would have worked well to be added to the syllabus. I think that reading this in a classroom or discussion group setting would certainly incite some fascinating discussions, as it creates multiple starting points for conversations as well as a path towards deeper understanding and appreciation for this time in history as well as for the book itself. Its retrospective time frame in looking at the Holocaust and Poland in particular is unique and fascinating. I must admit that I expected this to be more emotionally charged, but there is a distance that makes this book less about the emotion, and more about cerebrally considering the past. I hope that someone I know reads this soon! There is so much that I would love to discuss further!

Peter Matthiessen has a distinct and powerful way of entering the many dimensions of human values, beliefs, and actions like no other writer. In Paradise, is a masterpiece. It speaks to the existential dilemma that comes about through the witness of a holocaust death camp. Too big for a mind to hold and make sense of, Matthiessen weaves the lives of a few of the 100 people staying at the death camp, each for various personal reasons. It doesn't matter what the names of these characters are as much as what it meant for them to bear witness to a place that held the memories of people tormented and murdered by men who fully lost their sense of humanity.

In Paradise is not a book to be read once. It is a book to be read many times until we can each learn to arrest any semblance of actions that might flit across our own minds of hurting anyone for any reason. To have such brutal cruelty inflicted on people for no reason makes this story even more tragic. In Paradise is not just a story. It is a lesson we must learn and repeatedly remind ourselves about. History like this must not be repeated. Unfortunately, with many countries today, this book is a little late.

Peter Matthiessen will be sadly missed. The soul searching of his characters, I pray, will live on.

Jan Marquart, CEO and Founder of About the Author Network and author of 11 book.

Professor D. Olin Clements (What does the “D” stand for and what is the ultimate implication of the name?), born in Poland, but raised in America, is doing research for a monograph he is writing. He returns to Poland, a place he left as a child, and spends time at a retreat in a former concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is an outsider, attending with a group of people who have come from many countries, representing many religions, many opinions, many memories, a half century after the war’s end, to bear witness and honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
Each attendee was affected by the war in different ways, and soon, as they interact and speak about their experiences disharmony develops, and they begin to snipe at, and taunt each other, slinging insults and even questioning the right of some to share their stories, questioning their reasons for attending the retreat, questioning their self-righteousness, even the genuineness of their shame and their guilt for having survived the war. Often it was because they participated, “only following orders”, or were more aggressive as prisoners, or ignored the plight of those who were made to suffer, those who were uprooted, robbed of everything they ever had, not only of their belongings and their heritage, but of every living soul ever known to them, as well. Did they deserve the right to even attend the retreat, holding services in the mess hall and the residences and on the platforms used by the SS? Were they trying to obtain forgiveness for themselves rather than honor the memory of those that they, in their silence and acquiescence, helped lead to the slaughter. Was the escapee justified when his escape resulted in reprisals that caused the death of other innocent victims? Was his life worth the death of so many others?
They performed their services to the memories of those who died, in the shadow of the place the barracks once stood, in the shadow of the crematoria where the ghosts of the victims may still loiter, in the shadow of the overcrowded platforms that echo with the sound of the barking dogs and the German soldiers screaming Raus, Raus at the teeming masses of prisoners as they worked to accomplish Hitler’s Final Solution.
The novel is extremely blunt and outspoken. The conversations and confessions of the attendees more clearly express the horror than a simple narrative would do. In Poland, even after the war, in the effort to make the country Judenrein, the Poles, who swore they knew nothing, murdered an additional 2000 returning Jews, so that today, there are far less still living there. From 4 million, of which 3 million were murdered, there are approximately 25,000 souls today. Could those who participated, in any way at all, ever be forgiven? Could future generations ever be forgiven? Should anyone ever forget the sadistic monsters that planned, participated in and rejoiced in the prospect of a country that was Judenrein? The age old question is also, should they be forgiven or forgotten at all?
The author does not attempt to reconcile or justify any part of the Holocaust, rather he seems to be exploring the possibility of understanding it, from the point of view of the witnesses,, via confession and absolution. The hard, sharp edges that surround the border of hate and distrust, fear and resentment, jealousy and greed, are exposed. Because the information is presented in an uninhibited, raw manner, making it hard to read and absorb, at times, the information that has been presented countless times before, seems almost new again.
Clements discovers secrets about his past as he interacts with the other members of the retreat. He is descended from the aristocracy and did not realize that he had more in common with others who bore witness than he could ever have imagined. Do his ancestors bear any guilt, and if they do, does he by proxy? Having recently read “The Storyteller”, by Jodi Picoult, which has at its heart, the same theme concerning the Holocaust, I thought that this story felt more authentic and genuine. Using the same kinds of characters as Picoult did, coming from all walks of life, the Rabbinate, the Church, the atheist, Mattheissen approaches it without the artifice of a sexually charged love story, although there is a theme of self-discovery with thoughts about a forbidden romance. Every aspect of emotion behind the genocide is exposed and worked through by the characters, brutally and vigorously, laying bare the wounds and scars remembered, and yet the novel is not very long.
The Shoah can never be justified or excused, it can only be memorialized in the hope that it will never recur. Anti-Semitism still exists. It exists between Jew and Jew, Christian and Jew, Muslim and Jew. It is perpetuated by hateful teaching in homes and in schools and in houses of worship. It is handed down like a legacy from family to family. I felt that the more explanations were offered, the more questions were raised. What do sanctuaries provide for the dead victims? What do memorial services offer to the survivors? The only service the retreat and study of the Holocaust seems to provide, is a possible road to some kind of acceptance of the fact that the horror occurred, that we have to move on, but that we cannot forget, that we must always actively try to prevent this abominable anomaly from ever occurring again, anywhere. Many others suffered besides Jews, the Holocaust does not belong to them, although they have claimed it, but it destroyed the bulk of Jews, fully half their numbers, so systematically, so heartlessly, so sadistically, that it is not easily explained, understood or excused, rather it defies any sane explanation. This is a hard book to absorb, but I found it worthwhile.

for “homage, prayer, and silent meditation in the memory of this camp’s million and more victims.” I can't even imagine contemplating such a trip so I jumped on the chance to explore the lives of people who would. 140 attendees: rabbis; nuns; monks: biologists; Palestinians; elderly survivors; young Germans; Poles; Americans; scholars; witnesses, etc. gathering meditate on themes of evil and humanity. fyi - The author became a Zen Buddhist in the 1960's and later a Zen priest.

The story evolves around D. Clements Olin, a Massachusetts literature professor in his 50s gathering research for a work he is writing on the life and work of Tadeusz Borowski. For me, learning about Tadeusz_Borowski was a reward in itself. We also find out Olin was born in Poland to a Jewish mother (who may have ended in life in Auschwitz), taken to America as an infant and baptized a christian.

The 33rd book by the author, winner of the National Book Award for fiction "Shadow Country" and the 1978 book "The Snow Leopard, a spiritual account of the Himalayas, died aged 86 the date this book published. Along with George Plimpton, William Styron and Harold L. Humes founded The Paris Review in 1956, and would later disclose he was a CIA agent as well.

I consider myself fairly well-versed in modern literature, and I will put Shadow Country up against any other contender for Great American Novel. In Paradise was certainly nothing like Shadow Country. This book is difficult. It is not fun, there is no great plot, and it's definitely not 200 pages that you can't read fast enough. However, it definitely has the "feel" of an important novel. I think it may require repeated reading to fully appreciate. In Paradise is certainly not typical of, nor is it likely very good for, people who enjoy the the store Best of the Month books, though it is probably the most likely of the Best Book of the Month books to wind up to be taught in serious literature courses.

for “homage, prayer, and silent meditation in the memory of this camp’s million and more victims.” I can't even imagine contemplating such a trip so I jumped on the chance to explore the lives of people who would. 140 attendees: rabbis; nuns; monks: biologists; Palestinians; elderly survivors; young Germans; Poles; Americans; scholars; witnesses, etc. gathering meditate on themes of evil and humanity. fyi - The author became a Zen Buddhist in the 1960's and later a Zen priest.

The story evolves around D. Clements Olin, a Massachusetts literature professor in his 50s gathering research for a work he is writing on the life and work of Tadeusz Borowski. For me, learning about Tadeusz_Borowski was a reward in itself. We also find out Olin was born in Poland to a Jewish mother (who may have ended in life in Auschwitz), taken to America as an infant and baptized a christian.

The 33rd book by the author, winner of the National Book Award for fiction "Shadow Country" and the 1978 book "The Snow Leopard, a spiritual account of the Himalayas, died aged 86 the date this book published. Along with George Plimpton, William Styron and Harold L. Humes founded The Paris Review in 1956, and would later disclose he was a CIA agent as well.

I consider myself fairly well-versed in modern literature, and I will put Shadow Country up against any other contender for Great American Novel. In Paradise was certainly nothing like Shadow Country. This book is difficult. It is not fun, there is no great plot, and it's definitely not 200 pages that you can't read fast enough. However, it definitely has the "feel" of an important novel. I think it may require repeated reading to fully appreciate. In Paradise is certainly not typical of, nor is it likely very good for, people who enjoy the the store Best of the Month books, though it is probably the most likely of the Best Book of the Month books to wind up to be taught in serious literature courses.

Set in1996 in and around Auschwitz, Peter Matthiessen's "In Paradise" provokes quite a bit to think about in just over 200 pages. I find Matthiessen's writing demands the reader's attention and often requires rereading of passages to elicit an understanding of what he's trying to say. This can be annoying--his books take me longer to read than most authors'--but can also be rewarding. "In Paradise" uses a gathering of people meant to reflect and pray (and quibble) at the infamous former Nazi death camp. The primary character and source of the novel's momentum is a Polish-American professor named Clements Olin, ostensibly there to research the suicide of a camp survivor (and author), but also there to look deep within himself and his own family history.

It's through Olin that Matthiessen provides insight to the horrors of humanity (as animals) and also the possibilities of what a life can offer to include love and companionship. Interactions with a rabble rouser--the amusingly named G Earwig--provide a venue for contrary thought and even some humor and involvement with a somewhat disgraced Catholic nun offer glimpses of hope, but these are just glimpses. This is not a cheery novel, but one worth reading.

I respect the author's work although I generally don't care for what I've read of it and I can add this one, his last novel, to the list.
First of all, he's soooo serious about what is already a serious subject, no one could really master it so you could award him some stars for trying, and I did, but you want to ask why? Why would he attempt this as his swan song? And why all the vicious fighting and arguing? What's the point in the face of the worst we can do as human beings although we keep repeating various kinds of horror throughout the world. So what have we learned? Nothing!
There's little to enlighten anyone in this book. "Someone tell a joke already." And for a Zen Buddhist there's far too much "suffering" already in life so why would you add to it? For me the book didn't warrant a close reading, the prose could also be stifling, so I skipped around. I can't imagine a through reading, and it would make a better play than novel. You could compact much of this dramatically for better effect but Beckett has already written this play.
So I can't recommend the book except maybe as a curiosity,I wouldn't buy it, and picked it up when I saw it lying on a table in the library. Maybe the tragedy is that the author just couldn't stop writing, remember thirty books. I think it would be better if he just kept "sitting."

A thoughtful novel that records an American professor’s experience on a week long spiritual retreat to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Memorial, along with a diverse group of individuals from different religions and nationalities.

In Paradise is a thought provoking novel with expressive prose. The setting is a vital part to the story and is vividly portrayed with stunning accuracy. The history components of the story are also presented in an engaging manner.

The novel is very character driven but chooses to focus mainly on their existential ideas. I think the characters are suppose to represent exaggerated archetypes or symbolic caricatures. The characters have intense dialogue that can be blunt and offensive. This results in continuous, highly charged, unfiltered character conflict.

The plot was relaxed and exploratory but highlighted character interactions, revelations and back stories. The novel illustrates how a person’s culture, family, nationality, religion, and hometown helps mold their world outlook. It was interesting to learn why certain characters chose to make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, what they hoped to gain from the experience, and their view of what took place in history.

It was fascinating to watch the characters go through a cathartic transformation based on their longing for a sense of identity, redemption, absolution, and faith. I also enjoyed the philosophical narratives on the origin and evolution of evil, survival, and human nature.

[Disclaimer: I won a copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads]

This is a dark, bad novel, with an international cast of confusing characters, and a contrived plot which includes intimations of a forbidden love affair which only diverts from the already convoluted storyline. As the novel proceeds, its plot gets more unrealistic and characterizations more confusing. Perhaps the first half of the book was the author's second or third draft, while the second half of the book was only his first draft. Indeed, as he was dying of leukemia while writing this, he may have run out of time, may have had time only to write, but not to rewrite and to re-rewrite. This could very well be only a rough draft resuscitated by the editorial assistants that he acknowledges in his afterword. First draft or last draft, it sadly will remain his last book.

I greatly admire Matthiessen's non-fiction books about nature and wildlife. A good friend who understands my penchant for dark literature bestowed the book upon me, otherwise I would never have begun reading this novel, as I no longer have time to devote to the luxury of reading novels. My admiration for the author's non-fiction and my interest in his contemplations upon the Holocaust (I am ethnically Jewish and have visited Dachau) gave me the fortitude to finish reading it.

He could have more successfully expressed his noble ideas in a 50 page essay, as I do appreciate his thoughts about the Holocaust, including his accusations upon Christianity as espoused by the insectivorous Earwig, a ruffian whose loudmouth at least made him stand out from the confusing cast of the other characters.

Matthiessen's first book of non-fiction, Wildlife in America, is a gem. Whereas this novel about the Holocaust neither saddened nor outraged me, the chapter in Wildlife in America on the plight of the California Condor made me weep. First published in 1959, the book was already outdated when I read it in 1993, but its impact still is strong. It is no longer in print only because so many more species have gone extinct, yet that book still is worth reading. In Paradise, in contrast, was not worth my time.

I have read many books on the Holocaust, many feeling like something I have read before. Not this. "In Paradise" had a unique slant. Put a hundred or so people together for a week-long retreat at a former Nazi death camp, and something like this novel might happen. There are not neat and tidy plot lines. You don't come away knowing everyone's story. Some questions are answered (Why are they there? How did they change?), some not . This novel felt real. I don't expect that I will ever be part of a retreat like this, with people of all backgrounds (Jews, Christians, children of Nazi officers, a Palestinian), and so this book gave me that experience. It was not a page turner, nor always fun to read, but this book successfully transported outside my world. I'm glad I read it. It is a very short novel, and I am glad that the author did not stretch it out to "full length" as many authors do. The length is right for the story. The writing was excellent.

Some may find problems with Matthiessen going into the minds of many different people on a "retreat" at the remains of a Nazi death camp, but the author has a long and significant history. He has spent numerous years living among a wide variety of different cultures on different continents, written several non-fiction and fiction works about them as they see themselves, yet never romanticized them. I first knew of him in 1964 from his participation in studying the Dani people high up in a New Guinea mountain valley. Out of that came the documentary, "Dead Birds" and his book, "Under the Mountain Wall." "Dead Birds" remains one of the finest photo-ethnographies ever filmed and marks the beginning of a core in my five decades as a teacher. People of all kinds, every one, no matter their culture, religion, ethnicity or nationality, have achieved astonishingly wonderful things, but also have committed (and often forget) horrific atrocities. In my mind, "Dead Birds" and "In Paradise" frame the essence of a great mind. They demonstrate how cultures and the people within them become entrapped in definitions and world views that allow them to commit atrocities and horrors denied or simply not seen (except by others). To repeat, every culture, ethnic group, religious group and nation has committed them - yes - including our own, whatever or whomever we may be. Do read "In Paradise" in that spirit. You may still deny how your (my) people or society or culture or religion or nation has ever acted or thought as Nazis did, or you may justify if by some tricky mental stretching to declare it necessary. The horror, whatever it may be, still happened.

I have always been a huge Peter Matthiessen fan. I have read much of his fiction and non-fiction work. Although he seems most known for his non-fiction,like The Tree Where Man was Born, The Snow Leopard, and Wildlife in America, I really enjoyed the Watson trilogy on the Everglades outlaw and many of his short stories. I have even seen him speak and found him to be a very inspiring on the theme of nature and preservation. Unfortunately, I did not care for this novel. The characters seems very undeveloped. It is often hard to keep track of them and they seem somewhat one-dimensional. They all seemed to be defined by their grievances but we get no further information about their backgrounds or their motivations. The relationship between the main character, Clement Olins and the nun Catherine is somewhat confusing and too distracting to the rest of the book's narrative. I also found the chapter on Dancing at Auschwitz to be somewhat incomprehensible. Granted, I know little about Zen Buddhism, but the whole dancing episode smacked of something out of a Transcendental Mediation symposium that never translates very well to the non-believing listener. I think this book would have been much better as a non-fiction essay by Mattiessen on his experience in attending meditation retreats at Auschwitz rather then try to squeeze his personal views into a poorly constructed (for him) fictional narrative. Of course, it pains me to say this since I admire the man and his work so much. If you are new to Matthiessen, I don't recommend that you start with this book. For fiction, read Killing Mr. Watson. For non-fiction, read the Snow Leopard. That will give you a much better feel for the man's creative power and his legacy.

I read The Snow Leopard while travelling in Nepal in my early 20's and it had a profound effect. Thirty years later a very different book by the same author has impacted in a similar way. Multiple valid perspectives are given powerful expression including the manifestation of what we label as evil. The author articulates the mystery, joy and despair of being human while taking the reader on the collective developmental journey of the human race in its' efforts to transcend the fear generated from an " us and them" mentality, epitomised in the Nazi regime and supported less openly by other european nationalities at the time.

Clements Olin is a member of a group touring Auschwitz. They spend days there for various reasons, Olin because of his research into the suicide of a survivor of the death camp. As time goes on, each group members' motivation for coming comes to light and not all of it meshes well.

The worst part about this book is how detached the author seems from the people and the action of the plot. This should be an emotional roller coaster, as many things relating to WWII could be. This is why I picked up this book. Why then did the author choose to keep his distance? If he had not, I feel this would have been a better novel.

The novel tells the story of a weekly pilgrimage, when in 1996, at Auschwitz 140 people gathered to meditate, pray and remember the victims of the concentration camp. Among those who are stationed in the barracks where they SS officers once lived are priests and children of Nazis, relatives of dead Jews and elderly camp survivors, researchers and scientists. One of the pilgrims is the protagonist, 55-year-old academician, American scientist Clements Olin studying poetry of victims of concentration camps and composing poetry collections. Although Olin has devoted much of his life to studying the Holocaust, he can not say he has any special knowledge. You can not be an expert on the subject, if you personally weren’t at a concentration camp as an inmate.

Olin convinces himself that he came to Auschwitz to gather material for a book, but this is only a formal reason. The protagonist himself is not sure who he is and what he wants from his pilgrimage. Not sure and the rest of group. Every day they are gathering to pray, inspect dilapidated buildings, railroad tracks, ovens and gas chambers, talk about themselves and their stories, which led to the retreat.

The participants discuss a variety of topics, from religion and patriotism to Jews and Nazism. Every day some new topic is raised that leads to bitter disputes and discussions, considering how different the audience gathered at the camp site is.

In Paradise is an uncomfortable novel. It’s uncomfortable for everyone, the reader, and the heroes of the novel. Holocaust requires sensitivity. Holocaust does not recognize the hypocrisy, but tearful and compassionate feelings are also irrelevant. When faced with such a monstrous crime against humanity, you are inevitably lost, so literally you can not understand who you are.

Olin’s personality is revealed in the novel not immediately: the first few chapters Matthiessen presents us the main character as an outsider, a stranger. The mystery of personality is one of the main themes of the book. Every pilgrim in the novel reveals oneself thus as he wants. Everyone has prepared beforehand the reason for his pilgrimage, but the reason is most often contrived. The pilgrims either do not know or do not want to know the true reason.

Discomfort is a basic feeling the book causes in the first half. Minor characters one after another raise important issues related to the war and the Holocaust, and these themes in any other society or any other place would never have been touched, they are so painful and uncomfortable. But at the ruins of Auschwitz pilgrims have nowhere to go, and they came to pay tribute to the victims, and to understand something that worries and haunts them. Reading a novel, you feel yourself like one of the pilgrims who hear other people's speeches, noting courage of ones and hypocrisy of others. And along with Olin you can only agree that without being a direct participant in the tragedy, you do not have the right to an opinion and can’t add anything new.

The first half is full of suspense and verbal sparring but as the second half of the novel begins, it is like a completely separate thing, much weaker than the first. Matthiessen is as if exhausted by the main theme and went on less significant ones. The protagonist suddenly switches from a concentration camp to love affairs, which puts reader in another awkward position. Matthiessen sort of moves the place of the death of millions of innocent people in the area of the love affairs. The hero rational core ( and author’s) is gone somewhere, rationality giving way to feelings.
But it is still possible to forgive the author: lone hero could still feel a craving to another person in such tragic place. Difficult to explain the change of course in the final third of the novel. The author reserves the Holocaust behind, switching on the theme of the Catholic Church. Suddenly priests, insider’s intrigies and topic of pedophilia come to the first row. This turn of events is at least strange.

The final Olin speech before pilgrims also could be questioned. The speech is too staged and puzzling. Olin again loses his rationality, muttering something about "Polish Jews." And though his origins Olin found only here in Poland, this can not be that in 50 years he never thought of his mother. Hard to imagine that such a reasonable man had no idea about his Jewishness, when everything pointed to this.

I’m again feeling uncomfortable: how good first half of the novel was, you’re at discomort to critisize it, but otherwise it is impossible. Verdict: read the first half, skip the second.

When I started reading this story of a Polish-American professor who traveled to Poland in 1996 to attend a “Bearing Witness” meditation retreat at the Auschwitz death camp, I thought “This sounds familiar.” Among my Zen books I found one called “Bearing Witness,” by Zen teacher Bernie Glassman, describing a retreat he led in 1996 in the Auschwitz death camp. “In Paradise” contains details of the retreat found in the Glassman book, but focuses more on relationships between the individual retreatants and how the individuals and the “group dynamic” evolved over the five-day retreat.

Though Olin, the professor, was kind of annoying with his indecisiveness and stunted emotions, the characters were interesting and the suspense built into the various plot threads held my interest to the end.

"In Paradise" by Peter Matthiessen is a jarring novel--one that at times can shock and make you re-think your assumptions relating to society, history, and the Holocaust. The author's language is brilliant in places and confrontational in others, but is diminished by unnecessary distractions in the plot, such as a budding romance between two characters, and a rather simplistic storyline concerning the main character. Overall, this book is well-written and thought provoking. Read it for the beauty of the author's descriptive ability alone...

People of many divergent views and cultures converge at Auschwitz for a spiritual retreat. Some come to bear witness, some to reflect on the meaning of the organized, systematic death of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and countless others targeted for extermination by the Nazis. The participants stay in SS barracks during a cold, dismal winter. Matthiessen creates a somber setting to further enhance the novel's somber mood. Through the interactions between the characters the author is able to explore the meanings and implications the Holocaust has had on the past and present. It is a deeply moving novel for anyone seeking a better understanding of human nature, religion, and racism.
My study of the Holocaust has had a profound effect on the way I view the world and my place in it. For anyone seeking a deeper understanding of what happened and why, I suggest viewing, Genocide , narrated by Orson Wells and Elizabeth Taylor. This academy award winning documentary provides a stark and moving look at what happened.

Weighty. Timeless. Intricate. Through his well crafted characters Matthiessen takes on the vortex of complexity that is the Holocaust. A fair warning: You'll get pulled into this vortex for the duration, which was poignantly jagged and edgy. Great work.

A book about Auschwitz titled "In Paradise?":

"Christ crucified is importuned by a penitent thief, in agony on his own cross on that barren hillside.
'I beseech thee, Jesus, take me with you to Paradise!' In traditional gospels, Jesus responds,
'Thou shalt be with me this day in Paradise," but in an older text -Eastern Orthodox or the
Apocrypha, perhaps? -- Christ shakes his head in pity, saying, 'You are in Paradise right now.'"

This troubling parable presented in Chapter 9, is apparently the source of the provocative title. Peter Mattheissen, knew he was dying as he wrote this book. Two days before the publication of this book, the author passed away from leukemia. The April 6, 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine, in anticipation of this book, presented a moving profile of the dying Mattheissen. The photograph that accompanied that feature showing a weathered, wrinkled, stone-like imagine contrasts markedly from the photograph featured on the dust jacket. That feature at [...] is well worth the time of anyone who is considering reading this book. For the burden of establishing the standing to write a serious book of fiction about Auschwitz is a very heavy one.

Even great writers like William Styron, a close friend of Mattheissen, in "Sophie's Choice" seemed to lose his way, descending into a virtual miasma of pornographic depictions of degradation and despair while framing a somewhat problematic critique of Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. Great writers such as Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and, perhaps most prominently, Elie Wiesel in "Night", who lived through the unthinkable at Auschwitz have offered definitive writings, both fiction and non-fiction.

Mattheissen attended a retreat of the sort that serves as the basis for "In Paradise" in 1996 and clearly has drawn heavily from that experience. In some ways, his book is the flipside of Plato's Symposium where over an extended dinner notable figures from the golden age of Athens discuss love. Here, a group of approximately 140 individuals -- mostly Jewish, but including Polish intellectuals, Germans including some related to those who executed the despicable and evil designs of Hitler's Final Solution, a few figures from the Catholic Church, and many Buddhists -- gather to meditate and discuss what to make of Auschwitz. The primary meditation site is the point where the incoming victims of the Nazis were assigned their various stations, be it immediate extermination or the death-in-life existence awaiting another date in the showers.

The central figure is D. Clement Olin, a respected American professor, who goes to the retreat, ostensibly for purposes of research. Olin was born in Poland but was spirited out as an infant by his father's family while his mother was left behind on the eve of the German decimation of Poland's leading figures, undesirables, and Jews. His father's family on the edges of Polish nobility had left for America shortly before.

Olin is at once insightful and self-deluding, His life reflects the measured, subtle disdain his father's family had for him. He would be a character well worth exploring in a novel set in another environment, but while some of his significant personal travails in Auschwitz resonate with the setting, others are simply inappropriate. (More cannot be said without spoiling the book for those who have yet to read it.)

As the New York Times profile establishes, Peter Mattheissen is a truly exceptional individual who has written first-rate fiction and non-fiction. And his presentation of the various ways people have of approaching the outrage of Auschwitz both in and of itself and writ large is very thoughtful. References to Levi and, particularly, Borowski, are well developed. The poem from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova that serves at prologue is apropos and his ability to explain seemingly unsettling moments of transcendent joy amid the morose, dank, scene of horror is brilliant.

But the personal melodrama of Olin, is at best, distracting; some of it reeks of soap opera. A serious writer who decides to set a story in Auschwitz, be it during the Holocaust or in its wake, assumes obligations that almost any other setting does not require. Mattheissen clearly knew this, nearing the end of the book, he quotes Borowski:

"In this war morality . . . the ideals of freedom, justice, and human dignity had all slid off man like a rotten rag.
We said there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And, having save himself, he will
commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons . . first out of duty, then from habit, and finally -- for pleasure."

In this context, it may be appropriate to discuss a particular individuals flawed ability to understand his own motives. But not in all spheres of everyday life. Serious, provocative questions may be raised about those who committed the acts of atrocity, those who endured it, those who attempted to help, and those who either were actively complicit or who stood by while these things occurred. One may question whether the Holocaust was a unique event, what people owe each other. But the personal melodrama of one visiting Auschwitz is not appropriate and taints what is otherwise a book that closely explores how we may think about the unthinkable.

Peter Matthiesssen was a unique author, in being able to change voices and write dialogue in many different accents, and yet remain true to his characters. This book about the Holocaust tells the story in so many ways. The reader understands how people from many nationalities were affected at the time, and in the 50 years since. It is very specific, and yet universal.

In Paradise, A Novel by Peter Mattheissen is a powerful, yet troubling, book. It is the story of a 1996 gathering of people at Auschwitz. They had come together to pry, meditate, and contemplate on a deep lever the horrors that had transpired in this place. The main character, Clements Olin, joins the group. An American who had been born in Osweicim, the Polish town nearby, Olin remains a bit of a mystery through much of the book, but his roots in this place of horror become apparent as the story unfolds. Each of the characters in the meditation group has a troubled history that brings them to this gathering. Mattheissen peels away their masks and facades in his narrative, exposing the layers beneath so skillfully that one isn’t aware of the process, just of the story.

This book leaves one pondering one’s own response to the Holocaust and the attempts by various groups to disclaim the horrible events perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Facing the reality through Olin’s eyes and Mattheissen’s deft writing, one is left with more questions than answers. That is, of course, the point. This is a serious book that needs to be read that way.

A group of strangers from various countries gather to "witness" and bear witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, and gradually we come to learn their stories and why they're there. I almost gave this 5 stars. The prose was stark, yet beautiful, and it pulled me back to my own experience decades ago visiting Mauthausen, another concentration camp.

Every generation in every part of the world needs to read this book, and then devote time for reflection. It is eloquent and speaks to the very essence of the human condition. It's more than a novel. It belongs in a category by itself. (R. W. Heywood)