This isn’t even published yet, but I’m already looking forward to reading it. Omega Minor is Paul Verhaegen’s second novel, translated from the Dutch. Publishers Dalkey Archive Press are putting a lot of effort behind promoting it, and certainly it’s not a book that wants for ambition. I like novels that take on epic themes – provided they can actually deliver, like Richard Powers’ Plowing The Dark. This is the blurb on Dalkey’s site about Omega Minor:
Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charité, a Holocaust survivor tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Who is that talking cat, why do ghosts of SS soldiers roam the city, and what is Speer’s favorite actress up to?
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century—Berlin united and divided, Boston, Los Alamos, Auschwitz—Omega Minor is a novel of big ideas, a tale of survival of the soul cast in a whirlwind plot that is in turns smart, inquisitive, funny, violent, nutty, pornographic, moving, deeply compassionate, and profoundly moral. Or not.
Do scars ever heal? Can history be transcended? And will love, for once, save the world? Welcome to Omega Minor, where nothing is ever what it seems and nothing ever ends.
This also makes me want to go and re-read Don Delillo’s White Noise. I just hope it’s not as whimisical as Gravity’s Rainbow.
You can pre-order Omega Minor from Amazon.com – it’s out in November.
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