Helpful Score: 3
Very cleverly written novel telling the story of a Holocaust doctor's life going backward from his death to his birth. At first, I found the narrative to be very disconcerting. Dialogue and events were all written in reverse chronological order. The doctor's experiences after the war seem as if he is harming the patients while the atrocities committed during the war at the death camps read as if he is raising the dead and helping the Jews go to their original lives. For example on page 76 while the doctor is working in a hospital emergency room -- "You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don't mess about. We'll soon have that off. He's got a hole in his head. So what do we do? We stick a nail in it. Get the nail--a good rusty one--from the trash or wherever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he's allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night..." Some of the scenes during the war at the death camps were pretty hard to take but overall this was an exceptional novel - very creative and engrossing.
