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It’s a more than daunting task to review this work by Peter Matthiessen, whom I and many others regard as one of the two or three finest living American writers: A work set in Auschwitz during the 1990s whose main character, Clements Olin, an alter ego of the author himself, who comes, primarily, as it turns out, to see if he can discover anything about the woman who was his mother. But that’s not what makes it hard to review. Everyone who attends this gathering to “bear witness” is spiritually stripped bare during the novel and taken to task for sentimentality, lies and sloppy thinking, including: American Jews, Israeli Jews, Poles, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Auschwitz survivors and, not least, Zen adherents such as Clements Olin himself. The very term “bear witness” is taken to task as rank hypocrisy and sentimentalism, mainly by the character known through most of the book as Earwig. Every participant has his or her perversities, hatreds, deep character flaws. There is an entire chapter entitled “Dancing At Auschwitz” concerning a dance held by some of the participants in the “bear witness” gathering and the repercussions and recriminations that follow it. The very title of the chapter is bound to throw many off, never mind the contents. About these things, all I can do is let the prospective reader know what to expect. Pray, don’t approach the book with a cocksure attitude towards the Holocaust, save that it happened. The only ones - and none of them are at the gathering - who come across as thoroughly in the wrong are those who deny that the genocide took place. So, you’re forewarned about all that. The strengths of the book, it seems to me, remain Matthiessen’s fearless, virtuosic writing and what to me is the pith of the novel, encapsulated in Anna Akhmatova’s poem which serves as the epigraph to the book which ends:: “- something not known to anyone at all But wild in our breast for centuries.” Neither the poet nor Clements Olin can give this thing a name, but it has to do with something deep in the heart of man, something to do with falling in love, something so akin to to despair, that it might be called despair’s obverse side. But this meditation on human heartbreak and loss, on all the genocides which have happened, which are happening and which shall happen in mankind’s sojourn on the Earth is not for the sappy nor for those who have some Manichean view of the universe. If you’re absolutely sure that you’re in the right, this book will flay you alive. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by apprising the would-be reader that the book does not end on a cheerful note, but rather a heartbroken one. Still...in the penultimate scene, Clements visits a Polish cathedral, famed for its stained glass, and is alone in it during a thunderstorm: “In the high windows, ice blues of the firmament pierce wild red cells; all Heaven has been murdered, set afire. The winter sunlight comes and goes, shadows sweep past; the burning panes are lashed by sheets of rain. In that instant, as a sun shaft reignites the colors, the fire blood, the organ shriek, bind his mortal senses hard and tight as a pennant whipped by wind round its pole.” We have this splendour of prose which, though it leave you feeling as a pennant whipped by wind round its pole, will also leave you in awe that we still have a writer of Matthiessen’s scope and prescience under the sun.