The Dry Danube, Paul West's nineteenth novel, is a uniquely daring, dazzling, bravura performance by an acknowledged master. The Dry Danube, presents Hitler's "memoir" of the years he spent as a failed art student in Vienna, just before World War One. Each of the book's four parts is a solid raving block of barbaric flourishes, free of paragraphing in its headlong rush of disgorged spleen. "I wanted to get at H. before the violence sets...