After Dachau: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A Wild Ride
Review: This is a great book. It offers mind bending twists and valuable lessons. It is different from his other books in that the lessons are woven in the story rather than the lessons being
offered to you directly. If you want to jumpstart your brain, this is an excellent choice. It is also an engaging novel in a recreational sense. The best of both worlds. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: Makes you wonder...
Review: This new novel by Daniel Quinn is certainly unlike any of his previous books in that it isn't a work of cultural critique, but is still thematically connected to his past works, such as Ishmael and The Story of B. This is the story of a young man who is obsessed with reincarnation, who finally finds what he believes to be the real thing, and how this discovery shatters his view of the world and sends him on a daunting mission to share what he's found with others. If you've read Daniel's other books, when you finish this one you'll see that we have much in common with the young man at the end of this book. This book was enjoyable, readable, and thoughtful. I would recommend it to any Quinn fans as well as anyone who simply wants to read a great book.

Rating:
Summary: "History is an agreed-upon fiction." -- Napoleon Bonaparte
Review: What if everything you'd been taught about history was wrong? What if nothing had actually happened as the textbooks say? Worse yet, what if everyone, even those teaching this false history, really believed it to be true? Is something true just because everyone believes it to be so? And even if someone did discover the truth, would anyone care? These are the questions author Daniel Quinn tackles in his dystopian novel "After Dachau." In some ways it resembles the world George Orwell created in "1984," where history is constantly re-written to fit the current agenda. The difference is that, while the characters of Orwell's "1984" engage in "doublethink" - a means by which they can simultaneously know something as a fact and also believe it to be false, the characters in Quinn's story have no more reason to question their acknowledged history than you or I would have reason to doubt that Queen Victoria existed or that the New World colonists won the American Revolution.

Quinn has chosen as a vehicle for his ideas here the phenomenon of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls. Note that this book is not ABOUT reincarnation, nor does Quinn himself endorse the idea, despite the fact that it is a central element of the plot. Reincarnation is used here merely as a means of setting up a situation essential to making the reader think about Quinn's central theme - the manipulation of history - but which could not otherwise have occurred. In short, "After Dachau" introduces us to Mallory Hastings who, waking up after a car accident, has no memory of her present life, but only of her previous reincarnation as Gloria MacArthur, a girl who lived in the 1920s-1950s. Since then, the history of Gloria's own time has been drastically re-written, and only she knows the truth.

The revision of history, either deliberate or inadvertant, is something very common. What makes it potentially dangerous is that we often don't realize that what we are taught as fact and what actually happened are not consistent. Now, I'm not speaking primarily of grand conspiracies or even of propaganda campaigns known to be false by those who institute them. Though of course such things have been attempted, these blatant attempts at manipulation are not what we really have to worry about. They are, in general, fairly easy to see through and know for what they really are. The type of historical revision that is potentially more insidious is that which occurs when the writers of history actually believe themselves what they are saying. This can (and does) of course happen quite frequently without much harm done (compare history texts of today with those of a century ago, or two or three centuries ago - there will be differences due to changes in available information at the various times the texts were written). But Quinn's book gives us a big "what if?": If everyone on earth believes something occurred in a certain way, and believes it to be a good thing, does that automatically make it right?

There is a lot to think about in this book. Unfortunately, Quinn has not been nearly so successful in his aims here as he was with "Ishmael" or "The Story of B." In both of those works his message is quite clear and requires little independant thought to understand (though independent contemplation does greatly enhance the experience of reading both novels). In "After Dachau," however, his message remains a bit muddied and the book fails to wallop the reader between the eyes and give them the "aha!" moment that would be most gratifying. The book is filled with important ideas worthy of attention, but the presentation feels much more like a rough draft than a refined finished product. I would still recommend this one to others, but with reservations.

"After Dachau" is very simply written and can be finished in one or two sittings with no trouble at all, but this is a double-edged sword. It makes it easy to simply dismiss and forget about it when one has finished. Simply reading the book at face value and calling it a day will not leave a reader with much satisfaction. The plot itself is secondary to the ideas, and not very compelling in itself. And because the ideas are presented in a more unpolished fashion than in Quinn's other books, they will not grab you unless you grab them. Most of what I got out of this book occurred AFTER I had finished reading it, as a result of my own inner contemplation. I think it could have been a great book, rivalling Quinn's others, if he had spent a little more time developing it before going to publication. As it is, "After Dachau" is a good book, but falls short of its potential.

Rating:
Summary: Don't read the book jacket
Review: While I might have expected more in the way of content and length from Quinn, I still heartily enjoyed the book. However, I think most of my enjoyment from the book is that I knew nothing about it going in. I didn't read the book jacket, no one told me about it or anything. Because of this, it was incredibly enjoyable because the twists and turns of the plot weren't obvious to me at first and it made the book far better.

I definitely don't want to describe anything from the book...knowing anything about it going in will spoil it. The book's excitement and interest is based on plot twists (severe plot twists) and it's far more fun to go in with zero knowledge.