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"FacebookPinterestbeatrice cover.jpg\n\nHere, Yann Martel, the suddenly divisive author suggests five great books that inspired Beatrice and Virgil.\n\n1. If This Is a Man, Primo Levi\n\n Where you must start if you're interested in the Holocaust. Levi wrote it right after the war, and his memoir has the immediacy of the present moment. Yet he also manages to pull back and see the profound significance of what he lived through. It's this mix of the big picture and the vivid detail that makes this such a memorable book.\n\n2. Neighbors, Jan T. Gross \n\n A shocking account of the happenings on July 10th, 1941 in the Polish village of Jedwabne. That day, the Polish half of the village rose up and slaughtered the Jewish half, a bloodbath entirely Polish in the doing, with no direct participation from the Germans. This book, which caused a scandal in Poland, cures you of the delusion that the Nazis hogged to themselves all the evil of the Holocaust.\n\n3. Fateless, Imre Kertesz\n\n A novel that reads like an autobiography but is an actual novel, that is, a story that uses the tools of fiction to tells its truth. It tells a typical Holocaust story, of a young Jew whose life is interrupted by a hellish train ride and an even more hellish stay in a concentration camp, but the narrative strategy that Kertesz uses makes it something else. His young narrator never judges anything or anyone because he's young, only fifteen, and what does a fifteen-year-old know about the world? But then a judgement comes down like a guillotine near the end of the novel, and it's impact is like a kick in the stomach.\n\n4. The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald \n\n A masterpiece. A novel that circles around the Holocaust without ever naming it, that is soaked in its sadness without having recourse to the stock sentimentality.\n\n5. Diary of a Man in Despair, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen\n\n Something from the other side, from the Axis side, the diary of an anti-Nazi German, a man who hated Hitler and everything that Hitler represented. R-M was a sophisticated, well-connected man and there's a fascinating episode in his diary of a dinner he attended to which Hitler, then still a barely known agitator, was a fellow guest. Hitler impressed R-M as an arrogant, insecure country bumpkin, a man with unshakable but obnoxious opinions. It's a mesmerizing look at Hitler before he became a larger-than-life figure."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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