From Publishers Weekly
What happens to a dream deferred?" asked poet Langston Hughes. West (Lord Byron's Doctor) grounds his new novel in one of the most famous deferred dreams of the 20th century: Hitler's childhood desire to be an artist. Masquerading as a chilling and intellectually penetrating memoir of the F?hrer during the seven years he lived in Vienna, 1907-1914, the novel is written in a visceral stream of consciousness. The dense, darkly menacing text posits that failed art student Hitler was obsessed with the Viennese artists Kolberhoff and Treischnitt ("These men do not so much control Art, they are Art"). The two artists first inspire Hitler, then resist his courtship of them as mentors, and finally serve as reminders of his inadequacy, reminders that haunt his political career. The headlong narrative spotlights glimpses into the fictional Hitler's feverish mind from 1907 to 1945, hinting at his compulsive attachment to the art world that rejects him; the details and minutiae of art ("was not pointillisme in the air?"), anglophilia, power ("the Attilas, they are the ones who perhaps are closest to winning cosmic favor") and a move toward the irrational ("he murmurs the Latin word interfecit, meaning 'he killed,' while imagining himself a paropemassis, a mountain around which eagles dare not fly"). All of this the reader sees only through a glass darkly, as West reveals in a perspective-shifting afterword that gives the work a resonating impact. But no matter how heavily West's tale is draped in myth, he convincingly draws Hitler as a man desperately concerned with societal acceptance and careening toward monomaniacal frenzy. It is a slow-building shock to realize how the suffering of millions emanated from a bitter little man whose Danube failed to be beautiful. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As if to emphasize further his daring range, West is publishing two historical novels and a nonfiction work (The Secret Life of Words) this spring. West, whose 18 previous novels include the superb Rat Man of Paris and admired works about Lord Byron and Jack the Ripper, now takes on two more icons: Adolf Hitler and Doc Holliday. The Dry Danube is subtitled A Hitler Forgery, and West's school of fiction has its similarities to the art of a master forger. This novella takes place just before the Great War and is told in the voice of the failed Austrian painter Hitler. Its inspired narrative is stylishly solipsistic, like the paragraphless monolog novels of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (whose influence West acknowledges in an afterword). The narrator talks obsessively and bitterly about his two artist heroes, Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, who stubbornly refuse to recognize his brilliance and cooperate as mentors. The awful knowledge of what is to come later for Hitler (and for Europe) keeps the meandering narration from losing its tension. In a surprisingly enjoyable short work, West has found a voice that speaks with fluent authority to magnify a rarely examined historical moment before the Third Reich terrors. If impersonating the young Hitler was ambitious enough, taking on the famous dentist and consumptive gunslinger Doc Holliday (and his friends the Earps) may have been too far to stretch. O.K. is mostly written in a high-flown, third-person style that verges for long stretches on being a creative essay on Holliday and company. For a novelist, the mythology of the Old West is both attractive and dangerous: sources remain so unreliable on gunfighter history that it's difficult to acquire enough knowledge of someone like Holliday to build him an interior life or find a believable voice. Instead, West stays at a distance and, to create Doc's state of mind, shuffles his thoughts among the few things that are known definitively--that he coughed up blood a lot, hailed from Georgia, shot men expertly, played faro, and kept company with a widely admired prostitute named Big Nose Kate. If Doc remains fuzzy, Wyatt Earp is vaguer still. The Earps and Holliday who fought the Clanton gang in Thomas Berger's The Return of Little Big Man (LJ 2/15/99) may have been inventions, but they were vividly human characters. O.K., while containing lyrical passages of West's astonishing prose, is largely a missed opportunity to raise Doc and friends to the author's usual level of literature. Earpists will learn little that is new about the famous showdown. For larger fiction collections.
-Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
