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The Zone of Interest
The Zone of Interest
The Zone of Interest
Audiobook10 hours

The Zone of Interest

Written by Martin Amis

Narrated by Sean Barrett

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

From one of England's most renowned authors, an unforgettable new novel that provides a searing portrait of life-and, shockingly, love-in a concentration camp. Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. It showed you your soul-it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn't look at it without turning away. The king couldn't look at it. The courtiers couldn't look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could. The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other's eye, after we have seen who we really are? In a novel powered by both wit and pathos, Martin Amis excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 30, 2014
ISBN9781490633121
The Zone of Interest
Author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis (Swansea, 1949 - Florida, 2023) estudió en Oxford y debutó brillantemente como novelista con El libro de Rachel, galardonada en 1973 con el Premio Somerset Maugham, publicada en España (en 1985) por Anagrama, al igual que Otra gente,Dinero, Campos de Londres, La flecha del tiempo, La información, Tren nocturno, Niños muertos, Perro callejero, La Casa de los Encuentros, La viuda embarazada, Lionel Asbo.  El estado de Inglaterra y La zona de interés, los relatos de Mar gruesa, los ensayos de Visitando a Mrs. Nabokov, La guerra contra el cliché, El segundo avión y El roce del tiempo, y los libros de carácter autobiográfico Experiencia y Koba el Temible. Su última obra es Desde dentro.

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Reviews for The Zone of Interest

Rating: 3.7142857142857144 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

21 ratings13 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not a fan of the reading, as some long passages are done in a soft voice that is hard to hear. Also there are many German words and phrases that are hard to follow. Maybe if a translation is at hand, but in a car, this is difficult.
    A well-written story, unorthodox pacing and interestingly ironic tone that conveys the feeling of the dark times without too much description.


  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Zone of Interest est un livre difficile à lire, comme la grande majorité des livres traitant d'un sujet aussi épouvantable que l'extermination nazie dans les camps.Martin Amis a écrit un roman très âpre, peuplé de personnages pleinement engagés dans la machine de mort nazie, au cynisme total, parmi d'autres qui doutent mais qui tentent de penser le moins possible, parmi d'autres encore qui se sentent carrément coupables dans la conscience qu'ils ont de contribuer au mal absolu. L'auteur rend compte avec profondeur et habileté de la psychologie des personnages, des liens qui les unissent, les dévoient et les détruisent. Les détails de la "vie" du camp sont assez nombreux, précis et glaçants. Martin Amis s'est très largement documenté en vue d'écrire un roman qui colle au plus près de la réalité historique.À la lecture de ce livre intelligent, je me suis dit que c'était probablement son intelligence même qui m'en détachait peu à peu, avant que naisse la conscience que je ne supportais plus très bien les artifices romanesques au service d'un pareil sujet. Comment décrire l'horreur, en effet, avec des personnages de fiction, des dialogues inventés, des situations imaginées... si proches soient-il de ce qui a pu être expérimenté dans les camps de la mort?Ainsi, le livre d'Amis, qui n'a pas beaucoup de défauts (si ce n'est son recours excessif et contre-productif à la langue allemande (car de mon point de vue artificiel et inutile), est sorti de ma zone d'intérêt. Car rien ne remplacera la puissance des témoignages d'un Primo Levi ou d'un Robert Anthelme. Les survivants des camps ont eu tellement de mal à parler et à se rendre audibles... ne laissons personne d'autre s'exprimer à leur place.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Having been one of my favourite authors in the 1980s and early 90s (especially Money and London Fields, I gradually gave up on Martin Amis. However, after the uniformally enthusiastic reviews for Zone of Interest, I decided to give him another chance, even though I wasn't sure I wanted to read another novel on the Holocaust.
    Amis has tried to 'understand' what happened in Nazi Germany (even though he admits that it's almost impossible to understand) by largely keeping the plight of the concentration camp victims in the background and concentrating on the love lives and sexual encounters of those running the camp and all the awful day to day mundanity of their bureaucratic decisions which have such devastating effects on the inmates. It is darkly comic at times, stylishly written and very readable, but I'm not sure it adds anything to what we already know. It does what has been done before by showing us the banality of evil. Of the three narrators, the two Nazi officers get the bulk of the story but it's the third narrator, Szmul, the jewish inmate put in charge of the team disposing of bodies, who is the most interesting, but also the most problematic. It begs the question - what would any of us do to survive? - a question for which there is no real answer.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I always find Amis interesting, even if I don't like his novels. But this is gritty, insightful, and masterfully written. A brilliant companion to Time's Arrow.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I’ve read several Martin Amis’s books before and I’ve enjoyed most of them, so I decided to read “The Zone of Interest” despite not knowing anything about its plot. And when I started reading it and I found that it was about the Holocaust but mainly from the not very common German point of view, I thought that the premise was really promising.So, I felt quite disappointed when I started to feel that the story didn’t grab me at all and that I was starting to lose interest in what I was reading. It was not only that I didn’t sympathize with any of the main German characters, which I think may be perfectly all right in this case, the problem was that the story didn’t engage me at all. I also found that the use of German was excessive, cumbersome and didn’t add anything but quite the opposite; it made it hard to follow (even with a German-English dictionary).Maybe the problem is that the novel is too ambitious. It tries to be a love story, a farce, a history novel and many more things, but in my opinion it doesn’t succeed in any of those attempts.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Martin Amis has the reputation of being a writer interested in dark matter. This is often contrasted with his father's satirical writings. Here the subject matter is the darkest that we know and Amis tries to dig for meaning. A light touch won't work so he tries to look at detail. Neither the big picture nor the detail is comprehensible. Where is the meaning in it all? Viktor Frankl searched for meaning using his field of psychiatry. He came up with logotherapy.The characters in this Amis novel assure themselves that they are normal. What does that make the reader? the future?Frankl was a holocaust survivor. Amis is looking from the outside. Like Frankl, Amis used his particular specialty which is writing.We will keep trying and failing to understand. As Amis states, understanding would make it comprehensible and it should never be.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Well then. Right.

    You know when you're halfway through a rather bad book and you have that debate raging at the back of your brain: put it down, don't put it down, put it down - life is too short, don't put it down - you'll never know what happens or if it ends up being marvelous?

    The Zone of Interest is not, in fact, a rather bad book. I did however still have a debate raging throughout because, as about every other review written about Amis' Zone mentions, it's a disturbing read. It's a read I found myself having to take a few steps away from with regularity.

    This being my first go at an Amis novel, I can't really speak to much concerning the author. I will say that if there wasn't talent there, this book wouldn't have been nearly as hard to get through. Amis' satire reeks with putrefied banality of evil a la Hannah Arendt, in a good way. I haven't read a lot about the Holocaust other than a few histories and survivor stories. What I have read has been devastating. And when you experience that devastation, it's all too easy to remove yourself emotionally so that you can bear with it, get through it.

    Amis' use of humor, that reeking ripening satire, keeps you turned to the flame as it were. It keeps the intensity up because humor as conduit often weakens one's defenses just enough to keep you in the thick of things. I think it's Amis' talent with satire that makes this such a disturbing read.

    On a shallower bent, I did wish that I knew a bit more about various concentration camps and those that ran them in order to not be so puzzled in the beginning of this book. While it was pretty easy to recognize some names, there are things I felt the desire to look up throughout so that I'd have a better handle on things. Amis doesn't expend much energy on explaining the world he fleshes out in his Zone, so further research during the book and reading his afterword was immensely helpful.

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not one of the best by Amis.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Setting a book in a concentration camp is always going to subject a writer to extra critical scrutiny - especially if the concentration camp (the Ka Ze) provides the locus but not the focus of the story. Its not surprising that some of that critical scrutiny has been negative. Michael Hoffman, in his disparaging review for The London Review of Books complains that Amis is merely splashing through puddles, and that very little stays with the reader once they've finished the book. That's true to a certain extent; the book has its problems but overall I think can be judged a success. Can you write a book set in a concentration camp that is really about human character, rather than the Holocaust per se and make it readable and enjoyable? It seems you canThe book has 3 narrative voices but is dominated by that of Paul Doll, Camp Commandant. Doll is loud, boorish, self centred, frequently drunk, sexually frustrated and manipulative, barely competent and barely coping with the administrative stress of his job. And it is stressful; at a concert, rather than enjoy the performance Doll finds himself calculating how long and how much resources it would take him to exterminate and dispose of the bodies of the audience. Doll is a bureaucrat rather than a soldier - yet a total believer in the National Socialist cause. As the war progresses and news gets worse, his self delusions, paranoia, and treatment of prisoners such as Alisz, once the wife of a colleague now an inmate reclassified as a "Sinti" , or the head Sonderkommando, Szmul get worse. This section almost works. The language is crisp and fruity. Its clear that although Doll has delusions of ultimate victory, very few of his colleagues are similarly deluded, even if they use their language very carefully. Despite the macabre environment, this section is often very funny; for example there is an ongoing joke about the Doll family pony and its ongoing equine maladies that prevent it being ridden. The horse, it is implied, may be malingering. That Doll is unable to force a horse to work when he has the power of life and death over thousands of inmates, is supremely ironic.Doll can't control his wife either; and this part I'm afraid doesn't work. The character of Hannah Doll, at least as seen through the eyes of her husband, is sympathetic but not convincing. Hannah clearly despises her husband; she taunts him and teases him, whilst withholding sexual favours. Why then is she with him? Or more to the point, how did they get together in the first place? It is strongly suggested that this is connected to the arrest and disappearance of her former lover Kruger. And yet this subplot is never really satisfactorily resolved. And the solution Doll arrives at to deal with this problem of his wife, is simply risible, even for someone as increasingly insane as DollBut all in all this part of the book works even if Doll frequently lapses into German which can be frustrating if you don't have a translation device to hand (for instance if, like me you were reading the book on a plane). But Doll is a credible and interesting fictional character. The other two voices are less successfulGolo Thomsen is an administrator at the IG Farben Buna slave labor plant, producing synthetic rubber for the war effort. He is not a true believer in anything or anyone but himself. He looks on the war with mild disdain and from a position of relative safety, protected as he is by his "Uncle Martin" Bormann. An inveterate womaniser, he becomes besotted with Hannah Doll and begins a circling flirtation with her, which at first she rebuffs. There is also a suggestion that he is sabotaging the plant production. This is all very promising, and again, often funny, particularly his conversations with his comrade, Boris Eltz. But as the book progresses Thomsen seems to fade into the distance, and although an "aftermath" appendix ties up some loose ends, this isn't very convincingThe third voice is that of the Sonderkommando, Szmul. And this part is problematic - because Szmul's is the only voice of the inmates that we hear, and his voice gets less than half the pages of the others, so it feels as though its been tacked on. As though Amis felt he couldn't let the victims voices be totally unheard. So we hear plenty of grim details, but get very little insight. Szmul doesn't feel like a real, fleshed out character, he feels like a guilty addition.So whilst I found the book readable and an interesting perspective, I don't think its wholly successful. A massive improvement on nonsense like "The Second Plane" though...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    That the new Martin Amis novel, The Zone of Interest, is set in a World War II German concentration camp likely reduces the size of the book’s potential audience because many readers are simply not willing to peer very closely into that degree of darkness and depravity. In fact, publishers in France and Germany have been reluctant to even take on the book – although, finally, a small French publisher has decided to release it in late 2015. (The Germans apparently believe that the novel places some of the Nazi administrators in too positive a light.)It is more than the subject matter, however, that will make it difficult for some readers to finish the novel, it is also the general approach that Amis takes in telling his story – he uses satire and, of all things, humor, to portray how a culture as sophisticated and “civilized” as Germany’s allowed something like the Holocaust happen. Throw in a somewhat twisted love story, and you have the makings of an off-putting novel, one to which some will be reluctant to give a chance.This, for instance, is typical of the humor Amis sometimes uses in the novel’s dialogue. In conversation with another officer, one camp officer justifies inclusion of Jewish women and children in the overall slaughter this way:“Those babes in arms will grow up and want revenge on the Nazis in about 1963. I suppose the rationale for the women under forty-five is that they might be pregnant. And the rationale for the older women is while we’re at it.”Amis uses three very different narrators in The Zone of Interest: Golo Thompsen, Paul Doll, and a man called Szmul. Thompsen, a German officer and the nephew of Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, plays a minor role in the camp’s day-to-day activities. Doll is the camp’s mentally unstable commandant who is slowly breaking under pressure from Berlin to dispose of the camp’s inmates at what seems to him an impossible rate. Szmul is one of Doll’s Jewish inmates, a man who has stayed alive only by working hard at “salvaging” the valuables of those designated for extermination – even down to the gold in their teeth and the hair on their heads. The Zone of Interest is part love story, part horror novel. One of the most telling aspects of the effectiveness of Martin Amis’s approach is that, as I read the story, I was more shocked by the casualness with which the Nazis killed than by the actual details of what went on inside the camp. I was appalled by the thought that the whole thing, for camp administrators, became more of an engineering problem than a realization that they were murdering human beings. It was all about the process: how to dispose of the leftover bodies of thousands upon thousands of people, and how to kill more of them in the most efficient manner possible. It was all about processing “material.”The Zone of Interest is not a novel I will soon forget.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Another great example of fine writing from Amis. Difficult subject matter but the characters are wonderfully created and the dialogue and story telling top class. A great book through and through.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This most uncomfortable book describes the unimaginable horrors of a concentration camp from various points of view. Especially appalling are the glimpses into the minds of the Nazis running the camp, perhaps answering the question of how the unthinkable could happen.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I skipped the last Amis as it felt too familiar but this was worth coming back to. Set at a concentration camp but told mostly from the POV of the Germans, Amis has never been accused of avoiding controversy. He is unafraid of using humour and other wholly inappropriate devices to tell a tale of the death camps but his boldness never overshadows the awe and horror that the Holocaust inspires.

    I don't think this book is quite as successful as Time's Arrow, but Amis's continued grappling with man's inhumanity to man is the mark of a fine novelist and a mensch.