It is a truism that a book needs readers in order to have a meaningful existence. Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages both develops and inverts that relationship. It not only tells a story to its readers; it tells the story of its readers. To paraphrase its own words, it accumulates their inner lives. It becomes the agency that drives them — in one case to his death.
The book is Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel Rebellion, which depicts the fate of the disabled soldier Andreas Pum in the chaos of post-war Germany. The copy in question was rescued from Goebbels’s book-burning by a literature student, Dieter Knecht. It has come into the possession of his American granddaughter, Lena, who brings it back to Berlin, determined to uncover the secret of a mysterious map inserted by its original owner.
Hamilton has great fun with the conceit of the book as its own narrator, both envious of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which was published to greater acclaim the same year, and grateful to be shelved next to a study of insects: ‘It was the happiest time of my life, living with all that buzzing, like a constant summer.’
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