The Inventory - Hardcover

Lustiger, Gila

3.52

25 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559705493 ISBN 13: 9781559705493

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2001

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A sweeping novel of life during the Nazi regime probes every segment of German society during the Nazi period as it explores the devastating impact of persecution on society, from a young student tortured by the Gestapo because of a vague association with the Young Socialist Workers to a famed opera singer beaten for suspicion of homosexuality.

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From the Publisher:

The New York Times Book Review 1/7/2001

"People sometimes speculate about whether they would have emigrated if they’d been Jews living in Germany in the 1930’s. Gila Lustiger’s first novel, ‘The Inventory,’ which was written in German and published in that language in 1995, takes up this complex question by examining dozens of lives. Lustiger does so with remarkable compassion, if that means taking an interest in all the details of her characters’ existences and understanding their fears and motives, their longings and griefs and vanities. The result is one of the most powerful testimonies we have to the gathering storm that annihilated a whole population.

The title indicates right away that this novel will be, in one sense, a list of victims and their possessions, the sort of tidy inventory that the Nazis were so good at drawing up—a pitiless catalog of jewelry, real and fake, of gold extracted from teeth, of pen knives and telescopes and stamp collections. This book is solidly invested in the material culture of its period, which has the effect of making the human flesh seem all the more vulnerable, especially when hair itself is shorn and reused by the Reich.

But the other meaning of the title refers to its very construction, for the book is a collage, what used to be called a ‘pattern novel,’ one that assembles many lives and sets them in parallel paths—the lives of Jews and Christians, rich and poor, men and women, children and adults, Nazis and Communists, the good and the bad. Nor is this a novel that excludes the other victims of the Nuremberg race laws; Lustiger traces the lives of gay men, of petty criminals, of Gypsies, of fundamentalist Christians and of those who supposedly proved their disloyalty by attempting to emigrate illegally.

The novel’s construction never has a predictable, cookie-cutter regularity. One story will be told, then taken up indirectly from another point of view 100 pages later. Characters migrate from one narrative into another, as they do in real life....The extreme plainness of Lustiger’s style, in this straightforward translation by Rebecca Morrison, is reminiscent of Bernard Schlink’s in ‘The Reader,’ but the cumulative effect of the names, dates, anecdotes and lists of objects makes ‘The Inventory’ a far more powerful reading experience....This novel’s understated tome, the thick padding of believable descriptions of furniture, aspirations, clothes, jobs, the sharp, symptomatic exchanges of dialogue, the destabilizing variety of narrative techniques—all these artful elements lure us deeper into the woods. When we discover the birds have eaten our trail of crumbs, we are already in the burning presence of evil."—Edmund White

About the Author:

Gila Lustiger was born in Frankfurt in 1963 and educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since 1987, she has lived in Paris with her husband, the French poet Emmanuel Moses, and their two children.

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