Bookverdict.com

As if to emphasize further his daring range, West is publishing two historical novels and a nonfiction work (The Secret Life of Words) this spring. West, whose 18 previous novels include the superb Rat Man of Paris and admired works about Lord Byron and Jack the Ripper, now takes on two more icons: Adolf Hitler and Doc Holliday. The Dry Danube is subtitled A Hitler Forgery, and West's school of fiction has its similarities to the art of a master forger. This novella takes place just before the Great War and is told in the voice of the failed Austrian painter Hitler. Its inspired narrative is stylishly solipsistic, like the paragraphless monolog novels of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (whose influence West acknowledges in an afterword). The narrator talks obsessively and bitterly about his two artist heroes, Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, who stubbornly refuse to recogni...Log In or Sign Up to Read More