The Kommandant's Mistress

This is one of the best books I have read. Its structure is remarkable. Think of James Joyce and his stream of consciencousness style but in complete sentences and easy to understand. We get the interior monologues of the major characters as though they are remembering the past, jumping from memory to memory.The book is a powerful depiction of an unreal time. The marvel of this book is that the Kommandant is not portrayed as all bad and the Mistress is not all victim or all good. Cool language is the medium for the most distrubing events. It is the substance of what is being said that carries the power, not the use or overuse of bombastic verbage that so often writers use to show us how great their talent is. This book says more with less. In the end it is the most haunting of books.

As a student of the Holocaust, an interviewer of Holocaust survivors, and a writer/ professor of Holocaust fiction, I cannot recommend Ms. Szeman's book highly enough. Her research is meticulous and the breadth of imagination she uses to flesh out the historical detail for her readers is staggering. Also admirable is the stark prose with which she delineates the most horrific of experiences--perhaps the only way a tale of this sort can be told. And her depiction of von Walther, the Kommandant, is immensely compelling psychological portraiture. ...The kalidoscopic method of narration--juxtaposing and splicing the characters' experiences together in a series of snapshots--has been mentioned by other reviewers; I think it's one of the book's strengths and would be delighted to engage in a dialogue with Ms. Szeman or any of her students as to how/ why she chose this paricular method. I can be contacted at [email protected] In any case, for any serious student of writing and/ or the Holocaust, this book is a must.

WOW! This is an amazing book. It takes a few pages to get into Sherri Szeman's style. It is stream-of-consciousness interior monologue from the point of view of the Kommandant first and later his mistress. An amazing psychological profile of a "good" man doing his job as a Nazi in WWII. Then, in contrast, the same situation is viewed by one of his victims with whom he is obsessed. It takes your breath away. Her writing style is provocative and you just don't want to put the novel down until you find out what happens to these two people. You can tell Ms Szeman has done some research for this book either in interviews or reading or both because she gets inside the soul of the two characters. I recommend this book for anyone who likes a book that stays with them forever. It is deeply moving. You will never forget the Kommandant nor his Mistress.

This book is not fiction. It is not truth for that matter. This book is Mind. It is Mind under circumstance unimaginable. Szeman has weaved a web of instances, in a way no author before her has done. Time jumps, not in the linear fashion we as readers are accustomed to, but by theme. She explores the misguided thoughts of the Controller as well as the Controlled. No one's point of view is completely accurate. One can never tell what the "truth" really is, what "words" really mean. The most interesting aspects of this book are the times when the author is reluctant to paint the kommandant as a pure evil, and the times when she refuses to show his mistress as pure victim. Both play a twisted game of abuse with each other. The last, "objective" chapter of the book does what it can to disembowel our faith in recorded "history." In the end it is the personal histories we carry with us that matter. The setting of this novel is nearly inconsequential. Though the intensity of a German concentration camp adds to the sinister mood, this situation could have occurred anywhere anytime. In a Kazett, in a whorehouse, in a marriage. it is probably occurring even now.

I found this book to be a superior blending of storytelling and craft. My big mistake was trying to read it on a vacation. It sets a grim mood from the beginning and never lets up. The shifts in point of view are troubling the way an art film is troubling: vignettes of time sprinkled through the plot like snippets of memory. Over all, I think it well deserves reading. Like the cover blurb says, it haunts you afterward. Plus, it took a lot of nerve to take a subject that has been done and re-done and bring something different to the scene. Excellent.