In Paradise

Peter Matthiessen

$27.95

Publication Date: April 8th, 2014

Publisher:

Riverhead Books

ISBN:

9781594633171

Pages:

246

A large group of very different people, each with their own reason, goes on retreat at Auschwitz. Visiting Auschwitz for several days could not be more stark, yet Matthiessen masterfully layers in a chiaroscuro of experiences where feelings and responses surprise even the most resolute. The reader's experience of this novel seems closer to being washed over by music or wind than by what we think of as reading. Some wholly other form of communication is at hand in this fine, fine novel.

Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield's Books, Sebastopol, CA

April 2014 Indie Next List

Description

The bestselling final novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement, a three-time winner of the National Book Award.
Peter Matthiessen was a literary legend, the author of more than thirty acclaimed books. In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it.
One week in late autumn of 1996, a group gathers at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews in this camp to their deaths. Clements Olin has joined them, in order to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer's role and to bear witness, not only to his family's ambiguous history but to his own.
Profoundly thought-provoking, "In Paradise" is a fitting coda to the luminous career of a writer who was for all readers. He was for the world ("National Geographic").

About the Author

Peter Matthiessen was a three-time National Book Award winner (twice in two nonfiction categories for "The Snow Leopard," published in 1978, and again in fiction in 2008 for "Shadow Country") and the author of more than thirty books, as well as a world renowned naturalist, explorer, and activist. A cofounder of the "Paris Review, "he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of its William Dean Howells Award, a State Author of New York, and a recipient of the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, among many other honors. A longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Matthiessen eventually became a priest of the White Plum Asanga. He lived for more than 60 years on the South Fork of Long Island, where he worked as a commercial fisherman in his twenties and died on April 5, 2014.