Customer Reviews

After Dachau

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I picked up this book at 10:00 last night. It's now three AM, and I jusy finished reading it cover to cover.

After Dachau is simply that good.

A fan familiar with Daniel Quinn's other works, I was pleasantly surprised to find After Dachau to be a more carefully constructed novel than books like Ishmael. Instead of philosophy revealed through conversation, the reader is instead presented with an enormous metaphor.

The premise is simple: a wealthy member of the idle rich persues his dream by volunteering as a researcher at an institute that studies reincarnation. Assigned to a case in New York, he soon finds that nothing is as it seems.

Those who know Quinn's views of human history will likely be able to sniff out the metaphor early on, but After Dachau is accessable even to the average reader. Rather than a dystopic novel like "1984" or "Brave New World," which some of the reviews seem to liken After Dachau to, this book instead forces us to examine our past, rather than be concerned about our future (although a concern for the future logially follows examination of the past!)

I can highly recommend this book. It has the potential to take its place among works like "1984" and "BNW" in classrooms across the world, and it likely should be afforded such an honor.

Give it a read; you won't be disappointed.

Daniel Quinn's "After Dachau" is really two very different books in one, divided by a clever "trick." The first half is a suspenseful and exciting mystery story centering on the possible discovery of a truly documentable case of reincarnation. The two main characters find themselves on a journey of self-discovery as they explore what it really means to be an individual. If you're a fan of speculative fiction or psychological mysteries, you'll easily get wrapped up in the first part of "After Dachau."

Then comes the "trick." I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't yet read the book, but it's sort of a "Sixth Sense" kind of thing -- a plot trick that shifts the entire course of the novel and changes everything you've read so far.

After the trick (sort of after Dachau!), the book becomes a cautionary tale about what the world could become if we continue to live our lives as the selfish, entitled, "takers" we western white-folks really are (if this doesn't make sense, read "Ishmael"). It's not a bad cautionary tale, and even if you're not a DQ fan, you'll easily see the point he's making. But the book would have been stronger had Quinn stuck with a distorted interpretation of ACTUAL history (a new and frightening way to look at the world of the last 60 years), rather than the alternate history he gives us in "After Dachau". The world the two main characters face in part two of this book is NOT our world -- and as such, it's easy to step back and ignore the message. After all, WE didn't do what these people did. The world we live in today is NOT the world of "After Dachau."

What bothered me most about "After Dachau" was the short disclaimer Quinn placed at the end of the book, disavowing any interest or belief in reincarnation. Clearly the entire first half of the novel was merely a way of sucking in the type of readers who might be susceptible to his philosophy. Once you get past the mid-point (and the "trick"), you're his and the reincarnation story is dropped. Too bad. A really good novelist (without such an obvious agenda, perhaps) would have known how to integrate the story with the message. It would have made a better novel -- and, in the end, a stronger message.

It's a thought-provoking book, however, which is rare -- thus the four stars. Read it. It's worth the time, and you can argue with your friends about it afterward (what's better than that?)!

I've read all of Daniel Quinns books except Dreamer. My favorite is Story of B as far as its ideas and realizations go. After Dachau is the best book by Daniel Quinn that I have read as just a story. He has proven himself as being a great thinker as well as a great writer with this book. Basically his books are MINDBLOWING. After Dachau goes even further by becomming almost disturbing to the reader. Even though the book starts out being about reincarnation it is really about alot more than this. Reincarnation is only the setting by which he brings out his other ideas and introduces the actual setting of the book. Things are not what they seem in the first half of the book. I don't think that it is necessary for people to have read any of Daniel Quinns other books to have read After Dachau. In fact, if you haven't read any of his other books then After Dachau will shock you even more. Believe me it's a real page turner; I read it in less than 48 hrs. If you like this book then you would probably also like Ishmael-Daniel Quinn's bestseller.

Muslim B

This book is quite an imaginative work. I'm really into nightmarish utopian novels like Orwell's 1984, and After Dachau fits this category. I really don't want to give any of the plot away (I'll just say that the book's major surprize really jolts you and makes you think about...well...about ourselves and the way we live day to day and perceive our history and our role in that history) and so this is really just a cry for other people to read this great novel.

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.

Part 1 - A Review for Non-'Ishmael'-readers: If any of you never have heard of Daniel Quinn this is surely a book as good to start with as another. Quinn shows us not really a view of the future, as some may find. It's more an utopy and only in this point it's similar with '1984'. It's not really pessimistic, because he doesn't show us something which 'could' happen. It's more a clever parabel about how much you can accept the world's history without ever really questioning it. The surprising twist in the middle left me stunned and speechless. It's a really suspenseful book, which is very fast and easy to read. I can only recommend this to anyone (also the ones I will refer to next). Except for the boring, really overlong 'climbing-down-the-underground'-passage this book is somehow perfect.

Part 2 - A Review to 'Ishmael'/DQ-Readers: I will only refer to the ones who think they must be annoyed because of this book. What the hell did you expect? Did you really wanted another preaching book where we're told what we have to do? Do you really want to just going on reading the things instead of doing them? And, by the way, why can't you accept that DQ is an author, which means, he doesn't want to write the same book again and again. This is a great book, not handling THE topic so directly as the others, but anyway it does, and those who can't accept this are, in my opinion, narrow-minded.

Daniel Quinn is one of our most important novelists, working with the most important theme of today: how can we survive the insanity that is civilization? And this is Quinn's best book. I read it in one sitting, and for the last thirty pages I couldn't stop crying, even though I was on a crowded airplane. It's an extraordinary, and extraordinarily moving, book.

or a lot of others have...

One of Mr. Quinn's on-going themes is cultural/historic revisionism--people swallowing whole everything that Mother Culture whispers in our ear. In both of the Ishmael books (and, to a lesser extent, The Story of B), Mr. Quinn takes a definite step away from the real world, mostly, it would seem, to give us a slightly distanced view of our own culture; in A.D., the step merely seems larger (that's all I'll say about that, though the "professional review" above pretty comprehensivley obliterates all surprise in the book).

I write "seems", though, because, despite the rather large detour taken from reality, the book itself points out that we (in particular we Americans) tend to add a nice glossy coat to large parts of history and spend as little time as possible thinking about some of the other parts. It touches lightly on the history of colonialism (and even more lightly on the somewhat interesting question of what ~did~ happen to Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal?) in the same context as history "after Dachau" (the premise, not the title, of the book). Additionally, I recall seeing an piece in the news a year or two back that, already, a sizable percent of people polled either didn't know what the actual Holocaust was, or didn't believe it had happened. Sadly, it seems that alternate realities are not the only place where it sometimes seems "no one cares". Perhaps modeling himself on Ishmael, however, (or vice versa?) he allows the student to make connections, draw conclusions, etc.

I agree that A.D. lacks some of the depth of development he displays in his other works, but Mr. Quinn seems to vary his style to present his thoughts in ways that will appeal to varying audiences, so A.D. will appeal, for many reasons, to audiences that may not enjoy the Ishmael books or B. As in each of his books, however, he uses After Dachau to take a step back from our world and wax philosophic about the society we have built and the society we may build; everything from minor foibles to outright faults. In that, I think his writing is as sharp as ever.

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.

I give this book two stars rather than one based solely on the potential of the ideas at its core. Which is exactly why the book is so disappointing-- what a rich opportunity for a story, and what a lazy, uninspiring, pointless execution. Some of the worst dialogue I've ever read. You get the feeling that the author has become a little too enthralled with himself, and assumes that his readers will be on board no matter what he chooses to feed them. To say that the book is on par with 1984 and Brave New World is nonsense.