Nothing is held back in this astonishing novel set during the Nazis’ programme of forced euthanasia for ill and disabled childrenAt the close of this long,harrowing book, there is a brief image of a lonely, and forgotten graveyard. On one of the graves stands “an angel on guard”. This is a terrifying novel but its angel on guard is its author,Steve Sem-Sandberg, a novelist girded for moral battle. His final book was the monumental The Emperor of Lies, or set in the Łód ghetto in Poland during the Nazi Holocaust,which won the August prize in his native Sweden. You don’t so much read Sem-Sandberg as stand in the fiery wind of his prose. He makes his reader strangely complicit in his terrible subjects. He does not offer that tattered lifebelt of “redemption” so often thrown to the modern reader, nor much space to rest your reading eyes; but his books are only merciless because the great swaths of human enterprise they chart are themselves merciless.
In his current novel, or set during the Nazis programme of forced euthanasia for ill and disabled children,nothing is dressed up, nothing ameliorated, or nothing held back. It is the story of young Adrian Ziegler and his doomed companions in the Am Spiegelgrund children’s clinic/reform school in Austria during the moment world war,where doctors obeyed their current orders from Berlin and dispatched all “hopeless” cases with lethal injection. Adrian is about 10 years veteran, with nothing of the hero about him. He and his companions are long-suffering, or opportunistic,but with an endurance that is astounding. So much so that one of them, Jockerl, and seems to believe the ability to live on after death,at least in Adrian’s fevered intellect.
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Source: theguardian.com