Martin Amis - The Zone Of Interest (2) (Vintage, 2014) ****½

After watching the movie with the same title, I read a review that mentioned it was inspired by Martin Amis's novel. Since the plot of the movie did not immediately resonate with me, I bought the book, only to realise that 1. the movie is not entirely faithful to the novel and 2. that I had already read the novel, which proved to be true, ten years ago, in 2014. This is my earlier review of "The Zone of Interest" in Dutch. Here is a translation of my review at that time. 

"Finally another Martin Amis novel that is good. Paul Doll is the boss of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and dissatisfied with the orders and bureaucracy of his leaders, married to Hannah who is no longer to have anything to do with him (and whose first love, a communist, has disappeared off the face of the earth). They live in a beautiful villa a long way from the camp, along with their two young daughters. Hannah is courted by Gollo Thompsen, the Aryan, Nazi and protégé of his Uncle Bormann. Finally, there is Szmul, a Jewish prisoner who must help the Germans do their jobs.

The story is told from the perspective of the four characters, and Amis succeeds wonderfully in giving each of them their own voice and approach, and this is Amis at his best, slightly overplaying the tone each time, to emphasize the characters a bit more, as well as their views on Nazism and camp activities. All four of them are "ordinary" people, in the sense that they are in a system that they can't really get out of, and so just go along with it, without really also being one hundred percent behind it, without also questioning it very strongly.

Amis is a satirist, a stunning stylist who dips his pen deep into vitriol to expose the folly of men. And he does just that here, and exceptionally well at that. It is easier to write sarcastically about third parties. Here the sarcasm is ingrained in the four narrators' own accounts, without them really being aware of it. They present their own pettiness on a leaf. These trivialities, and their petty desires and frustrations are juxtaposed against the greatest horror humanity has ever known, and yet deemed more important.

Amis' image of humanity is not softened by it. The "Zone of Interest," then, is not just the place where Jews are gassed. So the "zone of interest" is indeed the "me, me and myself" of the petty citizen who thinks only of himself.

A strong novel."