In Paradise: A Novel

by Peter Matthiessen

Other authorsMark Bramhall (Narrator)

Digital audiobook, 2014

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

Publication

Penguin Audio (2014), OneClickDigital Unabridged MP3; 6h36

Description

"From the two-time National Book Award winning author of The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country, a short, powerful novel about an American professor of Holocaust Studies who, over the course of a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father"--

User reviews

LibraryThing member browner56

I was born about midway through Baby Boom era, more than a decade after the end of World War II. So, I have no direct memories of the many horrific events that defined that time, most notably the Holocaust. Indeed, when I was old enough begin to understand the sheer depravity of the “final

solution,” it was difficult to find much context that might help me process the implications of such inhumanity. What happened in places like Auschwitz was almost unimaginable to someone who was raised half a world away and so many years later. Further, how can the monstrosities of the Holocaust be reconciled with even more recent genocidal campaigns, such as those in Cambodia and Rwanda? I simply had no way to sort out the combination of outrage, wonder, lack of awareness, and even guilt that I felt as I tried to answer the question: What would I have had the courage to do—or even could do—to make a difference?

Peter Matthiessen’s profoundly moving novel In Paradise addresses just such a question. It is 1996 and a group of more than 100 people from around the world have gathered at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland for a week of prayer and meditation that, it is hoped, might lead to some understanding and healing. Among the group is Clements Olin, a literature professor from the United States who has no apparent connection to the proceedings save that he is of Polish heritage. However, as the reader soon learns, there is a deeper, more personal reason that Olin has come to the vigil beyond the need to “bear witness” that drives most of the other participants. From this premise, two parallel stories then unfold, one involving the complicated and sometimes volatile relationships that emerge at the spiritual retreat and the second one telling of Olin’s quest to understand his past while dealing with his very conflicted feelings for one of the other observers.

In Paradise, the title of which alludes to a Biblical passage referring to paradise being anywhere you are when in the presence of God, dares to tackle extremely difficult issues involving guilt, responsibility, and compassion for the perpetrators of actions so heinous as to seemingly defy forgiveness. To his vast credit, Matthiessen offers us considerable insight—albeit a little densely expressed at times—into both the universal and intensely personal sides of these questions, but at no point does he suggest any easy answers. Indeed, there is a quote near the end of the book that frames the narrative perfectly. Citing an ancient tale in which a rabbi consoles a sorrowful man who worries that he has not suffered enough, the rabbi counsels: “The only whole heart is a broken heart. But it must be wholly broken.” That is certainly a suitable way of explaining the plight of the author’s protagonist as well as a fitting summary for the entire message of this thought-provoking and affecting story.

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LibraryThing member LizzieD

Do not pick up In Paradise lightly. It is a heavy work in a slim volume. I will need to read and reread it before being able to review it if indeed writing a review ever becomes possible. Matthiessen immediately exposes the lies we tell to mask our hatred for each other and for what the other has

suffered and inflicted on somebody else. There is no answer. The answer transcends our ability to receive it.
Dr. Clements Olin has joined a group of "witnesses" who spend a week living in the guards' barracks at Auschwitz and meditating and talking about what happened there. His connection to the place is his academic focus on Tadeusz Borowski and Primo Levi, but he is not a detached observer. Auschwitz itself reaches deeply into him and demands his very self in response. He remarks that a very early Eastern reading of Jesus' reply to the thief crucified with him is not "Today you will be with me in paradise," but "Today you are with me in paradise." So the mystery is how paradise can exist in Auschwitz.
The reader is not left in despair. Like Clements, he is left wholly broken and being broken, is invited to live.

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LibraryThing member ozzer

Matthiessen’s use of Da Vinci’s painting of Cecilia Gallerani—“The Lady with the Ermine” at the beginning and end of this meditative novel about the Holocaust is an interesting choice. The exceptionally beautiful Cecilia seems pensive while holding this animal noted for its valuable

winter pelt as well as its viciousness and habit of thievery. The juxtaposition of these two disparate elements in this portrait— which incidentally hangs in a museum in Krakow, Poland—seems to reflect the complex emotions that surround Auschwitz and the atrocities committed there. The characters are on a retreat at ostensibly to bear witness to the outrages. Matthiessen manages artfully to express the multiple complex emotions surrounding Auschwitz and what it signifies in this wonderful novel: guilt, denial, complicity, abandonment, loss, depravity, racism, blame and the possibilities for joy and redemption while also presenting a very engaging story. The protagonist—Clements Olin—wonders how one can possibly witness such an atrocity and what insights he can derive from this retreat focused primarily on meditation. Matthiessen offers no easy answers in spite of most of the characters expressing firm but simplistic views. Olin is a Polish-American professor and poet, rescued from the region as an infant, while losing track of his mother in the process. He has a hidden agenda of attempting to learn more about her while visiting the region of is birth. Interestingly, Earwig—the most repulsive character in the book—also lost track of his own family when they emigrated to Palestine. Both men lost their heritage in the Holocaust. Matthiessen deftly weaves subplots into his narrative that maintain interest, including love between a layman and a novitiate and loss of faith but these do not overwhelm his main theme. This is a complex but entirely satisfying exploration of well-trod ground. There are no new insights into the Holocaust, but its artful treatment by this skilled novelist is exceptional.

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LibraryThing member sschaller

I cannot count how many books I have read about Nazi Germany for I am drawn to these sad novels where people die and somehow there is still hope. I find that the best of these books set in this time period are character driven. It is the story that makes the ultimate connection with the reader and

not just the events. The events are known and have been well documented to the point off almost numbness and maybe this is what this book is trying to get at- the numbness of atrocity. This book was difficult to be engaged with. I did not care for the characters and I thought the orator sounded dull and lifeless. Personally, I found the book boring and could not get through the second half.

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LibraryThing member fuzzy_patters

This isn't my first Matthiessen. I also read Shadow Country. I thought that one was much better than this one. This story about Clement Olin's quest to Auschwitz to learn what happened to his mother and his possible affair with a novice seemed pointless to me. I think Matthiessen was trying to hit

on how religion complicates peoples' true feelings, but I didn't connect with the story enough to care.

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LibraryThing member LSUTiger

This was a hard book to read for a variety of reasons. One reason is simply the description of events that occurred in the Holocaust at Auschwitz; the author describes these events in graphic detail on occasion as the main character, Clements Olin, and others are taking a tour of the concentration

camp in order to "bear witness" to the atrocities that happened there. It's also hard to read because the author shows us by telling these characters stories that the world has not really learned anything from the Holocaust. There are still extreme prejudices present, an "us versus them" mentality, even considering who has the right to grieve for the dead.

And yet, there are moments of beauty. There is a magical chapter in which many participants find themselves spontaneously dancing together in the camp. It is a brief coming together of humanity, but it is followed by people questioning how and why the dancing happened. As well as some guilt about how they could participate in an act of joy in a death camp.

I think the late Mr. Matthiessen was a very good writer, and he allows us to truly care and empathize with the stories held throughout the book and why participants react the way they do. Unfortunately, the one aspect of the book that I really didn't care for was a bizarre love story that was thrown in the plot. We learn that Clements has been a womanizer all his life, unable to truly connect with just one woman, and yet then he wrestles romantic feelings to a Catholic novice awaiting her acceptance in the Holy Orders. It seemed out of place in the story, but then so is dancing in a death camp.

It just seems odd that the book should end in that fashion.

I should also note that this review is based on the audiobook presentation of this novel. To that end, I have to say that the reader, Mark Bramhill, did an amazing job with the narration. He did the various voices and accents exceedingly well.

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LibraryThing member amaryann21

I read this book as an Early Reviewer. Clements Olin is a middle-aged academic who takes part in a retreat of sorts in Poland, to stand witness and remember the victims of the Holocaust. It's an international group and loosely organized, and it isn't clear why Olin has joined this group until a

ways into the story. Other members of the group are Catholic nuns, Zen Buddhists, Germans, and one guy that won't identify why he's there.

The atmosphere of post-Holocaust Auschwitz is very accurately portrayed, at least as I remembered it. The eerie, heavy, solemn atmosphere is sobering, and yet you don't really know how to act. In a place of tremendous hate and overwhelming torture and death, how should you witness? How does one visit this place and come away the same person? In the story, this is a central theme- what are they doing there, and how should they do it?

Olin's story comes out in bits and pieces, and by the end, his character is more solid. My only complaint of the book is that it took awhile to distinguish who was who and which personal story they belonged to. The emotion of the book is subtle, respectful, and personal in a way that is universal, if that makes sense. Well-written and easy to read, this book requires time and space to digest.

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LibraryThing member Esta1923

Early in this complicated book we read: "The point of life is to help others through it.....We must help the living while we can, since the dead have no more need of us."

In a recent interview Mr. Matthiessen, who has participated in three Zen retreats at Auschwitz, said he had long wanted to write

about the Holocaust, but that because he is not Jewish, he did not feel qualified.“But approaching it as fiction — as a novelist, an artist — I eventually decided that I did,” he said. “Only fiction would allow me to probe from a variety of viewpoints the great strangeness of what I had felt.”

A prologue tells of a boy refugee's sighting a transport train that left behind an old belt. The book's sixteen chapters take us to that place many years later, in 1996. Its cast is a mix of naive and sophisticated persons including two survivors. Their reactions (and interactions) are conveyed to us mainly by Clements Olin. His personal agenda emerges gradually, and, at the book's end we learn the cost.

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LibraryThing member Oh_Carolyn

I read this novel in a matter of hours, and it felt like being punched in the gut the whole time -- but I couldn't put it down. It's searing, breathtaking, difficult. In Paradise reads like first-person memoir, partially, I suspect, because the author did attend a retreat at Auschwitz in the late

1990s. It resists easy answers, platitudes, and conventions about the Shoah. I was surprised at the depths of animosity between cultures and backgrounds that the novel reveals, although perhaps I shouldn't have been.

It's a deeply affecting book, one that I think I'm still processing, and will be for some time. Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member andrea58

The only other book by this author which I have read is The Snow Leopard. Hard to tell this was written by the same person, I am glad I had the Audio version since I think I would have struggled with reading this book. The characters are mostly unlikeable. The setting and story are gloomy at best.

It doesn't really go anywhere. I did learn a lot about Poland during the war. But mostly you are waiting to find out each persons motivation for attending the retreat and their history. It was disappointing.

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LibraryThing member shazjhb

I disliked this book intensely. The main twist was somewhat obvious. The characters were boring. Do not read this book. There are tons of other books on the subject that are far more interesting and better written.

LibraryThing member bakersfieldbarbara

Sadly, this is the last novel written by the author, Peter Matthiessen and he ends with a gripping plot.

In 1996 a hundred people gather at the site of a former death camp. Because I have visited each of them, I felt as if I were back there again. Not a pleasant feeling, but I was pulled along by

this magnificent author, living and reliving the horror of the camps.Tensions arise on a political and personal surface and not allowing any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Each person has his agenda, and it makes for a great plot but an equally great novel.

Clements Olin, an American of Polish descent, is there only to do research, but ends up forced to abandon his research role to bear witness not only to his family's ambiguous history, but to his own as well. The author has done a masterful dialogue throughout the novel and the characters will be in your mind long after you have finished reading the book.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who loves good writing, great plots, WW2 experiences and unforgettable characters.

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LibraryThing member rmckeown

Peter Matthiessen, who is one of my favorite non-fiction writers, died this year on April 5th four days after the publication of his final novel. In Paradise is a peculiar story. It has the intensity of a work by an investigative journalist, with the compelling beauty of a wonderfully written

novel.

Clements Olin is an American scholar of Polish descent. He travels to Poland to attempt to discover the identity of his mother. He arrives to participate in a week-long retreat at Auschwitz. Along with about 100 others, they pray, meditate, and eat and live in the quarters occupied by the German military officers in charge of the camp.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is the eclectic group of people on this retreat. There are devout Jews and Christians, Catholic nuns and monks, a defrocked priest, atheists and believers, Germans, Poles, American, English, and French citizens. As the week progresses, emotions bubble to the surface, and things collapse into near chaos.

Even Olin questions his right to be there, as well as his purpose as a participant. He is not Jewish, and has no apparent connection to the Holocaust. He has a faded picture of a woman waving out a window, whom he believes to be his mother. The woman lived in the town near the camp. He tries to locate the house in the picture, but the townspeople are suspicious, and Olin fears violence.

In his inimitable style, Matthiessen describes the landscape, “The road follows the Vistula upriver westward across the frozen landscape; blue-gray hills of the Tatra Mountains and Slovakia rise in the south. Here and there along the way stand stone houses with steep roofs to shed the snows, most of them guarded by spiked iron fences (wolves and brigands?). These dwellings crowd the road in seeming dread of those dark ranks of evergreens that march down the white faces of the hills beyond like Prussian regiments (or Austro-Hungarian or Russian) crossing some hinterland of Bloody Poland, which has no natural boundaries against invaders” (14).

Like the landscape, In Paradise has no natural boundaries. People are pulled in from all over the world, and most are repulsed by the physical remnants of that unspeakable horror. I found the narrative somewhat disturbing.

Despite the negative aspects of the story, it was profoundly absorbing. The characters, who spoke up during the retreat, revealed individual reasons for coming to Auschwitz. Matthiessen held my attention to the last word. I had already seen and heard these stories many times, but Matthiessen put a new face on the evil. He showed how the experience changed the characters – most prominently, Clements Olin himself. If you have never read any literature of the holocaust, In Paradise represents a new look at a story that cannot, must not ever be forgotten. 5 stars.

--Chiron, 7/29/14

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LibraryThing member labfs39

In Paradise is a book about loss, memory, and whether it is possible for non-survivors to interpret the Holocaust. The main character Clements Olin, an American academic, joins a week-long spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, ostensibly to research his book on Tadeusz Browski, a Holocaust survivor and

novelist who committed suicide at the age of twenty-five. But there is a more personal reason behind his trip, and as the other retreat participants share their stories, the reader is asked to consider questions of identity and modern anti-Semitism.

I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. For me, the author too frequently used his characters to expound history, which felt pedantic and unnatural. I was also uncomfortable with some of the national stereotypes which he used. That said, I thought Matthiessen raises some interesting questions, including whether non-survivors can legitimately add anything to the discourse about the experience of the Holocaust and whether words are the proper medium for that discourse.

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LibraryThing member Lilac_Lily01

This book provides a new perspective of the holocaust death camps. So much has been written about the horrendous crimes that took place in Auschwitz and similar concentration camps that I wasn't sure if the author could add anything. But he did.I enjoyed listening to the story as much as one can

"enjoy" such a sad topic. The only thing that I didn't like was the narrators pronunciation of German words, as well as his version of a "German" Accent. You could tell that he obviously isn't familiar with the language and at times it was difficult to understand what he was saying when he mispronounced the German words. But other than that it's an interesting read and I would recommend it!

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LibraryThing member mtbearded1

Peter Matthiessen says this is his last book. I certainly hope he changes his mind. Beautifully written, indeed, prose poetry in places, this is a book I would dearly love to teach. Continuing with the theme of the role of conscience in human life, Matthiessen has given us a protagonist who

tortures himself as he searches for meaning--his own private meaning--on a retreat at Auschwitz. I will read and re-read this book many times in the future, and willingly add it to my personal syllabus for the classroom of my dreams.

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LibraryThing member Beamis12

A rather strange thing happened to me while reading this novel. I went to bed last night, leaving forty pages unread and all set to give this book a three star rating. Not because this is not well written, at 86 Matthiessen has definitely perfected his craft, but because I felt so distant from the

characters. Anyway I went to bed and dreamt this novel, that I was one of the participants at the retreat trying to come to terms with the horrible things that have happened there. I woke up realizing that the camp itself, Auschwitz, was the main character and that the characters were only a device used to tell the story.

A week long retreat at Auschwitz, attended by 100 people of diverse nationalities, religions and sex. Headed by a Zen teacher (of which the author is a practioner himself) they are there for remembrance, meditation, hoping to gain an understanding and come to terms with the past. Also a man named Clements Olin, who is said to be a researcher trying to figure out why the Polish author Tadeiz Borowski, who wrote stories and poems of his experiences while sentenced to camp, committed suicide at the age of 28. He is mentioned extensively In the first part of the novel. The pervasive atmosphere effects each of
these people in different ways.

The second part of the novel, unravels the personal lives of many of them, why they are really there, what they hoped to find, feel.This is also when the story of Olin is revealed and he must come to terms with a past, of which has only shortly been made aware.

This is a novel told in a very unemotional matter, the place itself provides the emotion, the awareness of what when on there, what the characters see and feel. Many leave with a new understanding, Olin among them. Some find their lives changed and more secrets are revealed.

So I had to give this a four, it was amazingly constructed, and the reader gets a chance to read about the many different people that have a need to remember. Plus this is the first book I have ever dreamed in which I was a character. Still shaking my head.

ARC from publisher.

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LibraryThing member porch_reader

A weeklong retreat in Poland at the site of a former concentration camp brings together a variety of individuals who have all come to pray and bear witness to the horrors that occurred there. At the center of the story is Clements Olin, an American scholar whose background is tied to the

concentration camp. The interactions between the attendees, whose nationalities and religious backgrounds give them a different perspective on the events that occurred there, become heated, and we come to see how complex it is to bear witness to an event of this magnitude.

This was the first of Matthiessen's books that I read, and I enjoyed his spare, precise language. The book will be released on April 8, just three days after his death on April 5.

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LibraryThing member michaelbartley

This Peter Matthiessen best work. It a novel where each character needs and wants to face their grief, they may want to face it but the sorrow is so huge they still run. There is no happy ending there is no closing they are no answers to the evil. nothing changes and everything changes.

LibraryThing member RobSchultz

This is not an easy book. Books that deal with the Holocaust are never supposed to be easy, even one that takes place more than fifty years later like this one. This book asks questions that are unusual and very confrontational. It calls into question why we would ever read a book on the Holocaust.

It questions what purpose it serves. What are we witnessing at this point really?

The question that remains is whether or not this is a good book. I think the answer is definitely yes, but not a resounding yes. It makes you wrestle with important questions, and to challenge your assumptions and also has moments of profound beauty juxtaposed with outright human ugliness. But, the characters are not always engaging, and what plot there is seems plodding and forced at times. An personal essay, rather than a novel, may have been more effective. Still Peter Matthiessen is always worth the time. (Please read any and all of his other books.) He will be missed.

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LibraryThing member lorimarie

This was a particulary difficult book to read but so well worth the effort. I read it nearly a month ago, and only now feel I can talk about it. Beautiful writing, I don't even feel qualified to write about it. There are almost no words to describe how profoundly this book affected me. A must read

for anyone interested in the Holocaust. Mr. Matthiessen is a rare talent and he will be sorely missed.

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LibraryThing member alpin

Peter Matthiessen was a masterful writer of both fiction and nonfiction who said that he had long wanted to write about Auschwitz but felt that -- as a non-survivor and a non-Jew – he was unqualified to approach it as a journalist, that only through fiction would he have the freedom to explore

the complexities of the subject. “In Paradise” is that fiction – his last, published just days after his death at the age of 86. It gives voice to troubling questions, not just about good and evil but about what can or should even be said about the unspeakable horrors of that place and about whether even the best intentions to commemorate and bear witness are legitimate. In probing these questions, the novel in fact questions its own legitimacy.

Matthiessen was a dedicated Zen Buddhist and in the 1990s participated in several Zen retreats on the grounds of Auschwitz. The protagonist of ”In Paradise,” Clements Olin, an American scholar descended from Polish aristocracy, has traveled to Poland to research the life of a writer who survived Auschwitz and committed suicide after the war. Olin tags along with a group of more than 100 people of different nationalities and different motivations who have come on a retreat to the death camp to meditate and bear witness. He struggles with the intense and conflicting emotions aroused by the ghastly crematoria and selection platform, his uncomfortable interactions with the retreat participants and his profound doubts about what any of them are doing there.

“So even if these people witness truly, what could 'truly' mean? Spreading word of their impressions of this scene of heinous crime? Too late, too late...Surely the time, means and goodwill of these would-be 'witness bearers' might be better spent out in the world, helping the hordes of refugees and other sufferers for whom some sort of existence might yet be salvaged. The point of life is to help others through it – who said that? We must help the living while we can, since the dead have no more need of us.

“In this empty place, then, at the end of autumn, 1996, what was left to be illuminated? What could the 'witness' of warm, well-fed visitors possibly signify? How could such 'witness' matter and to whom? No one was listening.”

This is a difficult novel. With the exception of one episode of spontaneous joy, it is chilling and bleak both in its setting and in its examination of past horrors and present ugliness. There are plot points involving a tentative but impossible erotic attraction, the unsurprising uncovering of a family secret and several absorbing back stories. But plot seems incidental to Matthiessen's purpose, almost as if he needed it to make this the novel he felt he had to write. You might consider the book a deeply personal meditation in the guise of a novel but little matter; you needn't question its legitimacy. It is a book that needs to be read for its beautiful prose and for its uncompromising willingness to confront painful truths.

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LibraryThing member detailmuse

The only way to understand such evil is to reimagine it. And, as Goya knew, the only way to reimagine it is through art.

In this novel, D. Clements Olin -- born in Poland, raised in America, now a scholar specializing in “survivor texts” -- is in the midst of a book project on writer Tadeusz

Borowski, who memorialized his experiences at Auschwitz and, tragically, committed suicide six years after liberation. To better understand writers like Borowski, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Primo Levi, Olin joins a spiritual retreat convened on the grounds of Auschwitz.

It’s a very short novel; the pages fly with lovely language and descriptions that put the reader at Auschwitz. But I found myself letting the book sit, rather than picking it up to read. To make a comparison: I may be one of few people who didn’t like the film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?; it seemed more a series of dry philosophical debates than a story. Well, this book felt very much the same. As in the quote above, Matthiessen felt he needed to write it as fiction, but it reads like an essay. Its group of stereotypical (and mostly unlikeable) characters mostly debate a series of heated topics, among them whether Germans should feel guilt; whether Jews were passive and co-responsible; whether there’s any place for Holocaust commerce (art, literature, tourism). Emotion comes into the book through two sub-plots, but one left me unsatisfied and the other annoyed me.

I liked the language enough that I’ll likely try an earlier novel by Matthiessen. If you do decide to read this one, I recommend doing so in as close to a single sitting as possible.

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LibraryThing member bibliophile_pgh

this is the first book that I had read by Peter Mathieson. It probably wasn't the best one to start. I did like the book, unfortunately I didn't love it. The book was a good detailing of man's inhumanity to man and how we try to reconcile that inhumanity and try to correct it. However, there were

some parts that seemed to jump and were disjointed. Over all though I will say that I am glad that I read it and was introduced to this author through his writing and would definitely love to read other books by him

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LibraryThing member Jcambridge

While i am a fan of Peter Matthiessen, I found this to be a very difficult read -- it was a struggle to finish it. The Holocaust is a difficult topic for most any reader or writer. Having visited Auschwitz and Birkenau more than 40 years ago and having traveled extensively in Europe since that time

(including Poland and Germany), I found the characters and the views very believable which is perhaps what made the book all the more challenging.

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