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The Zone of Interest (Vintage International) Paperback – July 7, 2015

by Martin Amis (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 2,123 ratings
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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From one of the most virtuosic authors in the English language: a powerful novel, written with urgency and moral force, that explores life—and love—among the Nazi bureaucrats of Auschwitz.

"A masterpiece.... Profound, powerful and morally urgent.... A benchmark for what serious literature can achieve." —San Francisco Chronicle
 
Martin Amis first tackled the Holocaust in 1991 with his bestselling novel Time's Arrow. He returns again to the Shoah with this astonishing portrayal of life in "the zone of interest," or "kat zet"—the Nazis' euphemism for Auschwitz. The narrative rotates among three main characters: Paul Doll, the crass, drunken camp commandant; Thomsen, nephew of Hitler's private secretary, in love with Doll's wife; and Szmul, one of the Jewish prisoners charged with disposing of the bodies. Through these three narrative threads, Amis summons a searing, profound, darkly funny portrait of the most infamous place in history. 
 
An epilogue by the author elucidates Amis's reasons and method for undertaking this extraordinary project.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  4. Publication date
    July 7, 2015
  5. Dimensions
    5.16 x 0.7 x 7.98 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0804172897
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0804172899
  8. See all details
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  1. Who are you? You don’t know. Then you come to the Zone of Interest, and it tells you who you are.
    Highlighted by 91 Kindle readers
  2. But the eyes are the windows to the soul, and when the soul is gone the eyes too are untenanted.
    Highlighted by 59 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, The Village Voice, The Miami Herald, Financial Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, BookRiot

“I was riveted by Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest, with its daring projection into the mind and ‘heart’ of a character . . . It felt like a fitting way to spy on historical events that are impossible to look at but that must, nevertheless, always be kept in sight.” —John Colapinto, The New Yorker

“Engrossing. . . . Rich in black comedy.” —Chicago Tribune
“Elegant and subtle. . . . An intriguing, sophisticated effort to understand the daily culture of genocide.” —Los Angeles Times

“[A] serious and diligently researched work with a streak of deadpan humor that reframes, and reemphasizes, the horror at hand.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Powerful and electric.... A book that may stand for years as the triumph of his career.” —NPR
 
“This is a novel that will endure.... A novel whose adventurousness is at the level of its ethical register, its attempt ...  to imagine the unimaginable.” —The Guardian (London)
 
“A tour de force of sheer verbal virtuosity, and a brilliant, celestially upsetting novel inspired by no less than a profound moral curiosity about human beings.” —Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter
 
“Signature Amis at his most inventive.... It is precisely through such inspired and irreverent fluency that his dead-serious purpose is realized.” —The Washington Post

“The Zone of Interest harrows in the true sense of the word, churning up our preconceptions and assumptions. It is a work of artistic courage, chilling comedy and incontestable moral seriousness.” —Financial Times

“Heartbreaking.... [Amis is] a virtuosically vivid writer.” —The Atlantic
 
“His finest so far.... Astonishing.... A tragicomic moral blowtorch worthy of Swift.” —The Daily Beast

“Compelling.... Harrowingly effective.” —Slate

“Returning to the Holocaust—the subject of Time’s Arrow, still among [Amis’s] best books—Amis seems greatly energized, addressing the most serious theme with rigour, sophistication, and, most astonishingly, wit.” —The Village Voice

“[Amis] is still the scourge of cliché and the supreme man of letters. . . . Dazzl[es] us once more with verbal dexterity and gutsy inventiveness.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[A] pulverizing novel about identity and humanity. . . in equal measure funny and crushing, with emphasis on how chaos and mass psychosis act on the souls living through it.” —The Miami Herald

“Moving. . . . Genius. . . . Capture[s] that contrast between frivolity and horror with elegance and irony.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“An important book—relentless, excoriating, blisteringly well-written. . . . Mr. Amis is one of our most accomplished writers. . . . Fiercely sharp-witted, his writing has the capacity to be so unique and dexterous as to create the impression he works from some higher alphabet than the rest of us.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Exceptionally brave. . . . An extended rumination, a nightmare. . . . It’s exciting; it’s alive; it’s more than slightly mad. As the title suggests, it’s dreadfully interesting.” —The Sunday Times

“Displays both restraint and humanity. . . . Takes on themes of immense gravity. . . . Martin Amis isn’t new to the business of turning the horrors of history into fiction, but he has never done so more thoughtfully than in this disquieting novel. . . . He has confronted its challenges with honour and delicacy.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“As good as anything Amis has written since London Fields (1989), and one he obviously felt compelled to write. He has done his subject justice.” —The Spectator

“Highly cerebral and innovative, and also human, humane—even humbling—this is a brave, inquiring work from a literary maverick whose biggest problem as an artist has been his rampaging talent. He has certainly harnessed it here.” —The Irish Times

About the Author

MARTIN AMISis the author of 15 novels—among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train—along with the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He died in 2023.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Reprint edition (July 7, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0804172897
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0804172899
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.7 x 7.98 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 2,123 ratings

About the author

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Martin Amis

Martin Amis

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Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Amis's work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
2,123 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars "Nothing sane to report."
Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2014
Verified Purchase
In this masterpiece, Amis makes a fresh assault on the ability of a people to launch such concentrated hatred toward the annihilation of the Jews. My title is taken from the report of an American reporter in Berlin in 1918. From that point, "hallucinatory anti-Semitism and world historical flair for hatred" is sparked to culminate in the Final Solution. The world was saying "alas to less and less" (Auden) One of the characters wonders aloud about the conference where the idea was unveiled. Eight doctorates, and not a flinch or a protest emerged.

The "Zone of Interest" unveils the story of "Who somebody really is." The narrators are a foppish consultant, Thompson; a Jewish worker or Sunder, and the Commandant, Doll, himself. The world is the fictionalized Auschwitz where the air has grown foul with the stench of the dead and the staff lives in pleasant surroundings. We are lulled at the outset by the story of Thompson falling in love with Doll's wife. The language is prosaic until shortly his best friend has to depart to partake in selection at the railroad siding as a punishment for his lack of discipline.

What follows is the forced look each person must endure of their true selves in the mirror of the KZ. This is a story told many times with numerous views and commentary, yet this book is a fresh and deeply tortured visit to the world of the dark side of the soul. His prose is darkly, spry and sometimes disturbingly humorous. As the limits of what is forbidden are pushed further and further, the enterprise has moved in horrifying fashion from the taking of the "Jews off their high horse." Most poignant to me is Szmul, the Jewish man whose forced slavery work has rendered him vital to the working of the camp. He argues endlessly with himself over the issue of his own survival and his role as a witness. To Doll, this renders him a primary target for the gas chambers.

Doll being the sole main character who believes his brief, has descended into madness. The others teeter perilously on their views of themselves searching for ways to escape the depth of their own involvement. This brings the current question, is anything less than full rebellion to the Reich a total damnation of the soul? Many a vignette involves the small resistances that ensue in the camp. Where does the reader stand in the mirror of the soul? I am deeply impressed with the scope and depth of this novel within the frame of a novel assessable to the reader and engaging to the mind.
46 people found this helpful
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Elizabeth J. Tarry-crowe
4.0 out of 5 stars Not For the Faint of Heart....
Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2014
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When I heard a review of Zone of Interest prior to its release I immediately thought "oh hell no." But something about the concept (and the way the particular reviewer on NPR presented it) made me unable to stop thinking about the concept of this challenging novel.
Romance. At a Nazi concentration camp. And not some kind of "boy in the striped pyjamas" type thing either. A story about the Germans who are running the camp and the ersatz rubber factory attached to it---THEIR romances, or at least their lusty thoughts that might possibly lead to romance. And don't worry, there is not a single cliched character or situation anywhere in this novel. And I mean anywhere.

So, all right, I think. Martin Amis never leaves me with a "meh" and I've read a ton of those sorts of books lately. I need to rip into my psyche and tear it a new one the best way I know how--with a book.
Mission accomplished.
What's doubly fascinating about this book: you are immediately dumped into the heads of 3 characters, one at a time, 2 Germans and a Polish prisoner in charge of, well, "gleaning" from the dead is probably the nicest way to put it. But Mr. Amis spares no "Deutch" either. German words populate the narrative which at first is kind of amusing, as most of the words are pretty obvious, and sexual in their origin. Easy to figure out from context.
But then, you realize that while one of the characters is musing about his frigid wife, he's doing so while meeting trains loaded with Jews, giving them a little speech and then pointing them towards the gas chamber. The narrative jumps around some but for the bulk of the story it's the tag end of the war when things are going more than a little pear-shaped for the Nazis.
Which is why so many of the men in this book are going slowly but surely insane. They know what they are doing but are covering it up with euphemisms and jargon that, even in German, start to be come gruesomely clear to the reader. The moment you're reading along, merrily hoping this one, apparently very attractive German dude will hook up with the wife of his Commandant and realize you've just read and entire missive about a meadow that is heaving and roiling and emitting such foul gas into the air because it's stuffed full of dead people--from the point of view of the guy who put them there....well...its the sort of jolt you don't normally get reading a typical Holocaust novel.
This book is NOT for the squeamish or for anyone who's a stickler for the Chicago Style manual either. But it is for anyone who loves the wild genre-defying concept of presenting many of the men (and women) who put millions of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others to death at the whim of one crazy man, as victims too. Victims of their own misplaced, nationalistic hubris and what not, sure but by the end, victims of their bad luck, of living the wrong time, under the wrong leaders who ordered them all to do a Very Wrong Thing.
89 people found this helpful
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Shadow
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book, but the movie is better. Read "Time's Arrow" instead
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2024
Verified Purchase
I can see that Jonathan Glazer got his idea from the unique perspective of this book (the romantic shenanigans and personal backstabbing of the Nazi protagonists, with the horrors of Auschwitz offstage, in the wings). Where the movie focuses on the relentless *sounds* of the horror, encroaching on happy Nazi home life, the book focuses on the *smells.* The book also has more of a plot, with a rising (sexual, domestic) crisis and a twist at the end. I "enjoyed" the book (if you can use that word) and put off seeing the film till I had finished it. But then the film completely blew me away. You don't need to have read the book to experience the film. It's a good book, but the film will far outlive it. Read Amis's "Time's Arrow" instead for a Holocaust book that will floor you with its inventiveness and power.
9 people found this helpful
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sheila lasek
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for everyone.
Reviewed in Canada on March 22, 2024
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It’s the truth behind what went on with some of the Nazi’s running the death camps. Unbelievable eye opener.
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Oliver Page
5.0 out of 5 stars Grappling With The Unthinkable
Reviewed in Italy on May 4, 2024
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I first read Amis in my twenties. His uncompromisingly savage and shockingly funny early works - Money, Dead Babies and Success - just exploded off the page in an irreverent, virtuoso linguistic tour de force. Over the years I’ve read some other works and often found the same flare stylistically but no real other reason to read his books. Although they are always extraordinary to read, I haven’t found them to be long-lasting works of literature. So when I realized that the Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest, was based on his novel I immediately wanted to read it.
Who else but Amis could find the language to grapple with the rational madness of the holocaust and unthinkable acceptance of the people caught up in National Socialism? The novel puts the reader in the shoes of various characters living in a concentration camp and gives voice to their everyday thoughts and experiences. From Doll the camp commander to the officers and soldiers under his command, to his wife Hannah. As you would expect with Amis there is dark comedy but not to make the reader laugh, rather to emphasize the grotesque and the stupidity of the men behind the regime. There is no sentimentalism nor indulgence in the human suffering of the victims, rather there is an attempt to depict the people who carried out the atrocities or were passive witnesses to them. What most impressed me about the book was the deeply emotional nature of the characters and their attempts to hide or deny the truth of who they really are. And surviving themselves and living with themselves is yet another form of death inflicted by the Nazi the regime.
Highly believable, brilliantly written, never heavy or dull. This is the book I was hoping to read - a truly great writer grappling with the unthinkable, navigating human characters through the darkest hour in our history. Recommended!
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Jet
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 12, 2024
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A really difficult read about a horrific subject but a unique piece of writing, a work of art.
One person found this helpful
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Roberto Rockmann
5.0 out of 5 stars Grande livro
Reviewed in Brazil on February 16, 2018
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Um dos melhores livros lidos nos últimos cinco anos, com narradores em primeira pessoa: o comandante do campo de concentração de Auschwits, um oficial nazista filho adotivo do secretário de Hiltler que se apaixona pela mulher do comandante e um judeu chefe da "equipe de limpeza".
2 people found this helpful
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Phil
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is terribly good and terrible
Reviewed in Australia on February 2, 2024
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Written with such intensity and vitality. I was there. Nothing g else to say. A terrific book about a terrible time.

The only complaint is the misuse of numerals for words. 1 for one. 2 for two. Etc. I sent hundreds of corrections through my kindle reading. In a way I was thankful for the diversion away from such a terrible narrative.

Still, I'd like a fee paid for all my hard work.
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