sarahredacted's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
5.0
kingkong's review against another edition
3.0
This would have been much more effective if it was half as long
eavans's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
apocryphal_goose's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
abookishtype's review against another edition
4.0
Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, David Albahari’s Götz and Meyer is a long stream of conscious meditation on history and historiography. In this novella, we visit the mind of an unnamed Holocaust survivor living in Belgrade. This survivor hid with his mother during the war, so he did not have direct experience with the worst of what happened to most of his extended family. Consequently, the narrator is obsessed with learning about the eponymous Götz and Meyer. Götz and Meyer were the SS soldiers responsible for killing most of the narrator’s relatives between 1941 and 1943...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
alexlanz's review against another edition
An amazing book; I got into the flow of the monologue, and his meditative doubts on the abilities and strengths of art, and I'll be thinking about the pages on carbon monoxide for a while...
cors36's review against another edition
4.0
'Gotz and Meyer' is short and almost featureless, written in a sort of stream of consciousness style and in one long paragraph. It reads like a memoir, an investigation into a past that can never be understood.
The narrator is a man who is researching and teaching the history of the Holocaust in Serbia, where most of his family perished in trucks that functioned as moving gas chambers. In looking into the past, he runs across the names of the drivers, Gotz and Meyer, who haunt his present. The real-life men remain a mystery to him, interchangeable, but are always to some extent human. He says, "Anyone could have been Gotz. Anyone could have been Meyer, and yet Gotz and Meyer were only Gotz and Meyer, and no one else could be who they are," but questions what kind of humans they were. As much as they are no more than names, they were humans, doing monstrous things as part of their daily routines - and treating the Jews they murdered as interchangeable parts.
I've read quite a bit of Holocaust literature, but have never learned much about what happened in Serbia (perhaps because of more recent turmoil), and cannot remember hearing of the trucks that mostly predates the gas chambers in the concentration camps. The book had an occasional dark humor and quick pace, but in the end was as unsettling as a work like this should be
The narrator is a man who is researching and teaching the history of the Holocaust in Serbia, where most of his family perished in trucks that functioned as moving gas chambers. In looking into the past, he runs across the names of the drivers, Gotz and Meyer, who haunt his present. The real-life men remain a mystery to him, interchangeable, but are always to some extent human. He says, "Anyone could have been Gotz. Anyone could have been Meyer, and yet Gotz and Meyer were only Gotz and Meyer, and no one else could be who they are," but questions what kind of humans they were. As much as they are no more than names, they were humans, doing monstrous things as part of their daily routines - and treating the Jews they murdered as interchangeable parts.
I've read quite a bit of Holocaust literature, but have never learned much about what happened in Serbia (perhaps because of more recent turmoil), and cannot remember hearing of the trucks that mostly predates the gas chambers in the concentration camps. The book had an occasional dark humor and quick pace, but in the end was as unsettling as a work like this should be
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