Fiction
The Book of Dirt
Bram Presser
Text, $32.99
The Book of Dirt opens with a fable – or, at least, with a story that would be a fable, for its register, its heightened drama, its portend, were it not for the fact it is true. It is the story of two small villages in a contested part of Eastern Europe “one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Jew-fearing”, and how a young man, Jakub R, comes to leave the former of these.
But what is most startling about this fable is the way in which Bram Presser introduces each of its characters – with their name, and then the almost-always abhorrent and brutally cruel way in which they will die only a few years later.
The effect of this is twofold – it is a signalling, firstly, that the horrors of the Holocaust and the difficulty of writing or telling stories about or from it are always at the forefront of the book; but it’s also an indication of the mode in which it operates, slipping between fiction and history, realism and fable, document and imagination.
Read the full review by Fiona Wright at the Sydney Morning Herald.