Discoveries

The Year Is ’42

A Novel

Nella Bielski

Translated from the French by John Berger and Lisa Appignanesi

Pantheon: 224 pp., $18.95

April 1942; the novel opens in Paris on Karl Bazinger’s day off. An officer in the Wehrmacht stationed for two years in Paris, Karl worries that the Gestapo has already identified him as a nonbeliever in its cause. He has been warned about his references to the war as a “fatal folly.” He is asked, to his great revulsion, to spy on his French friends. Then he is visited by a neighbor from his village in Saxony, an officer who is a traitor to the Germans. The second portion of the novel’s triptych is set in that village in Saxony, where Bazinger is home on leave and the Gestapo comes looking for his friend. In the third portion, Bazinger is sent to Kiev, on the eastern front, where his lack of conviction, the gulf between his profession and his beliefs, manifests in a degenerative skin disease. He falls in love with a young Russian woman with whom he fathers two children. Nella Bielski has written a shadowy novel, riddled with doubts and fears and suspicions that blow through the two cities and the village in a ghostly way. And it is full of beauty; fields, rivers, delicious meals and conversations.

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Home Land

A Novel

Sam Lipsyte

Picador: 240 pp., $13 paper

Lewis MINER has been informed by Principal Fontana that he is one of the few members of his high school class of ’89 -- “minus the dead” -- who have failed to add their updates to the alumni newsletter. It seems, contrary to youthful expectations, that he simply “did not pan out.” Sam Lipsyte’s “Home Land,” an epistolary novel, is Miner’s effort to “sketch the contours of a life lived in the shadow of more celebrated Catamounts, an existence eked out in the margins of post-Eastern Valley High School America.”

It is hilarious. If “Napoleon Dynamite” made you laugh, you will choke on “Home Land,” in which Miner exposes, with indecent relish miraculously preserved 15 years later, those successful frauds, his former classmates; ex-girlfriend Bethany, who now works with the advantaged (“must be very fulfilling”); writer-poseur Bob Price, a.k.a. “Colette Man”; Hollis Wofford, convicted on two counts of murder, who shares a cell with Georgie Mays, another Catamount alum, held on assault charges for exposing himself to a maiden aunt. And many more.

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The End

Hamburg 1943

Hans Erich Nossack

Translated from the German by Joel Agee

University of Chicago Press: 112 pp., $20

“I feel that my mouth would remain closed forever if I did not take care of this first,” wrote Hans Erich Nossack, three months after the Allied bombing of Hamburg. On that July morning in 1943, Nossack had set out from his home in Hamburg to join his wife for a vacation in the countryside, about nine miles south of the city. That night, they woke to the sound of 1,800 planes converging on the city, a sound that “made a lie of all talk.” And so begins Nossack’s report of the bombing and the aftermath, a description written in the first person; factual, detailed but a voice that flies up and echolocates, bouncing off the charred remains of chimneys and bodies and trees.

In his foreword, Joel Agee refers to “the windless calm” in Nossack’s report, a rare and fine example of what W.G. Sebald called a “natural history of destruction.” Nossack refers in the report to his use of “the language of women,” by which he means something quiet. He writes of the refugees pouring from the city: “Just wanting to help them seemed too loud an action.” He writes of the new beginning: “There once was a creature that was not born of a mother. A fist struck it naked into the world, and a voice called: Fend for yourself!” And he admits to a kind of happiness at this new beginning, a feeling he believes many shared amid the destruction. “The End” is a small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next.