The evil that men do | 3 August 2017

The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There is no possibility of turning page after page engaged in finding out what comes next, of being lost in the characters’ stories. The usual pleasures of fiction are so thoroughly absent that the reader emerges at the other end blinking into the light, struggling to remember what all the fuss about books is anyway.

This is apt, perhaps, for a novel about historic suffering and man’s inhumanity to man. The conceit is that an unnamed collector has amassed a hangar-sized museum of war, full of weaponry and the historical accoutrements of conflict. It has become an obsession for him: scrap metals are ‘the milestones of his existence’ and he sleeps in a coffin wearing a German iron helmet and a samurai mask — but now he has been killed in a fire that destroyed much of the museum too.