From Publishers Weekly
Venerable writer Fast (The Immigrants), master of the heart-tugging historical drama, delivers a moving tale of tragedy, inner healing and absolution. Married only 11 days, pacifist American engineering student Scott Waring and his wife, Martha, are arrested by the Gestapo in May 1939, while watching a Nazi rally in Berlin, where Scott is imprudently carrying his grandfather's pistol. The Nazis wrongly suspect them of conspiring to assassinate Hitler, and Scott is forced to gaze through a one-way mirror as SS thugs beat Martha. Told that Martha will be killed unless he confesses, Scott concocts a confession, but, shortly thereafter, the Nazis murder her anyway. Chance gives Scott a chance to escape his captors, and the Jewish madam of a whorehouse facilitates his route to the American embassy, from where he returns to the U.S., devastated. When the narrative jumps forward 1951 and Scott's sessions with his New York psychiatrist, we learn of his guilt over Martha's death, which has left him sexually impotent; of his U.S. army service, in which he blew up German bridges; of his searing trip to Buchenwald after the concentration camp's liberation. Then Scott falls in love with Greenwich Village dancer and waitress Janet Goldman, a Holocaust survivor who had been raped and beaten by the Dachau camp commander. Eventually Scott finds that he is able to love again. Fast is anything but subtle, but he has written a solid, well-constructed novel that is both a forceful meditation on evil and a poignant love story. 50,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Scott Waring and his wife are privileged young Americans, but on their honeymoon trip to Berlin in 1939 they experience deadly Gestapo tactics. Some years later, as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, Scott helps to liberate Buchenwald concentration camp, suffering further psychic wounds. Trying to recover from these accumulated traumas, he sees a psychotherapist, undergoes a symbolic circumcision, and searches for more than a decade for someone to love. As an engineer during the war, Scott frequently demolished bridges, but now he labors to build connections among people. Fast (Seven Days in June, LJ 7/94) is a veteran novelist who provides skillful narration. In one key detail, however, his story may test the limits of credibility. That Scott would unthinkingly carry a revolver within yards of Adolf Hitler, casually fondle the gun inside his pocket, and hence be accused of trying to assassinate the Fuhrer may seem implausible, but such events are crucial to Fast's entire plot. Recommended for public libraries.
-?Albert Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
-?Albert Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
