Laura Hodes

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Immortal Bloodsucking Opportunists

By Laura Hodes

Anne Rice declared in 2005 in the Author’s Note to her novel “Christ the Lord” that her return to Catholicism meant she would no longer “write anything that wasn’t for Christ.” She professed no more vampires, since they reflected a “world that didn’t include redemption.” In her new novel, “Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim,” then, Rice creates a new hero, one who seeks redemption with the divine aid of an angel and explores another idea from that same Author’s Note: that the sheer miraculousness of Jewish survival is proof to her of God.Read More

Furious Responsibilities

By Laura Hodes

Max Aue, narrator of Littell’s new novel — translated from the book’s original French, in which it received the Goncourt award — is a former Nazi officer. His phrase “ordinary men” recalls the seminal 1993 book “Ordinary Men” by historian Christopher Browning. In it, Browning argued that men in the German police killed Jews not “because they were devils, but because they were humans,” motivated not necessarily by antisemitism, but by peer pressure and career concerns. (Browning writes in his preface, striking a similar chord to Aue: “The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader….”)Read More


     

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