3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For neither alcoholics nor the sleep deprived, November 13, 2008
This review is from: The Investigation (Paperback)
Reading Saer's The Investigation provides both pleasure and pain. Endless sub-clauses prove excruciating for those who are memory challenged, ensuring that many sentences will need to be re-read and then, at times, read yet again. Proust is less convoluted in the construction of his text. However, whilst Saer's sentences are wonderfully punctuated and incredibly constructed, many a time, the meaning lost, one simply chooses not to re-read sentences simply because, at the end of the day, they add little to the progression of the narrative and, one suspects, have little merit in themselves. Nevertheless, one also stumbles on passages of exceptional beauty and superb insight. It very much appears that Saer has set out to toy with the reader and, as a formidable writer, is most capable of doing so. I admit to being a fan of neither Borges nor Cortazar (whilst appreciating the odd work of both) - it may be that Saer's work has a different audience in mind to one consisting of readers like me. Having laboured through Nobody Nothing Never, I was reluctant to embark upon The Investigation - I have, overall, been pleasantly surprised and will be keeping my eyes open for other works.
NB the first review of The Investigation posted on this site is a review of another work entirely.
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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Investigation, March 27, 2008
The Investigation is a poetic condensation of the court record of the trial, held in a German court in 1964-1965, of twenty-one persons who participated in the destruction of four million people at the concentration camp of Auschwitz in the years 1941-1945
Peter Weiss, whose Marat/Sade was hailed throughout the world as a major theatrical innovation, has chosen this way to bring these events to the stage. The dialogue of The Investigation was not invented. Rather, the actual testimony of the accused and their accusors has been distilled to bring out what is essential to the author's vision.
Central to that vision is a documentation of the outstanding negative achievement of our civilization: the use of the concentrated power of a modern technology by a sophisticated leadership to draw a highly civilized people into participation, active or passive, in the irrational destruction of a segment of its own population which had been designated worthless.
From the testimony of the survivors comes a literal and sickening account of the procedures at Auschwitz, the gas chambers, the mass cremations, the starvations, the brutality, the medical experimentation - all parts of a routine whose goal was impersonal efficiency in exterminating large numbers of people.
But the accused, who since the war have led conventional and useful lives, cannot be made to understand that obeying orders at Auschwitz twenty years ago constituted a crime. "The witnesses felt guilt," Peter Weiss has said of the trial; "the accused felt none."
The Investigation raises inescapable questions about the citizen's relation to the society in which hew lives. To what extent is he accountable for his own actions? Does conformity with a prevailing social of political code of behavior absolve him of individual responsibility? If his government, purporting to act for the good of the whole society, enforces a code that conflicts with his own convictions, should he resist - and when - and how?
--- from book's back cover
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