Customer Reviews

The Kommandant's Mistress

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is one of the best books I have read. Its structure is remarkable. Think of James Joyce and his stream of consciencousness style but in complete sentences and easy to understand. We get the interior monologues of the major characters as though they are remembering the past, jumping from memory to memory.

The book is a powerful depiction of an unreal time. The marvel of this book is that the Kommandant is not portrayed as all bad and the Mistress is not all victim or all good.

Cool language is the medium for the most distrubing events. It is the substance of what is being said that carries the power, not the use or overuse of bombastic verbage that so often writers use to show us how great their talent is. This book says more with less.

In the end it is the most haunting of books.

The star rating for this book was difficult to decide on - I'd wanted to move it up to 3 1/2 stars, maybe 4 -- but the rating would have to be conditional. This book is not for everyone - the topic and the writing style are both disturbing, probably not by chance.

Sherri Szeman was my creative writing teacher some years ago - she was an excellent teacher, a demanding critic, sending things back for re-writes, as I creaked my way back from years of non-writing. I picked up a galley edition of her newest book (currently titled "Only With the Heart") at a recent bookseller's convention, and though I'm three-quarters of the way through, found it so frustrating that I decided to read her first novel, "The Kommandant's Mistress," which had gotten rave reviews.

Although the style used in both books is virtually identical - shifting without warning several times in each chapter from different time periods in the character's life (very difficult to get used to), I found that unusual style worked in this book much better than it does in her new book.

Why? It may be because this book reflects an extremely disturbing time, when the minds of a nation were (to put it mildly) confused, mired in the darkness of Adolph Hitler's leadership.

The first part of this book is written from the perspective of the Kommandant, the second from that of the mistress, who of course is not a traditional mistress by choice or definition. The last section offers two short bios of the characters which leave many questions open.

Someone called this a poorly disguised Harlequin -I would have to say, NOT! Harlequins are formula novels, light and fluffy. If you prefer your novels to have a plot neatly laid out, with a satisfying conclusion, do NOT read this book - you will be disappointed!

If you enjoy a creative writing style, and an in depth look into the lives of two ordinary (not normal) people in an exceptionally evil time, you will probably enjoy this book. The lead characters are full and complex, the story is gripping. Szeman has researched the events of the time and uses quotes from historical figures (she provides a long list of books in her Author's Notes for anyone who wants to read more about that time.

For those who have an interest in the Holocaust, this book should be on the 'must read' list.

WOW! This is an amazing book. It takes a few pages to get into Sherri Szeman's style. It is stream-of-consciousness interior monologue from the point of view of the Kommandant first and later his mistress. An amazing psychological profile of a "good" man doing his job as a Nazi in WWII. Then, in contrast, the same situation is viewed by one of his victims with whom he is obsessed. It takes your breath away. Her writing style is provocative and you just don't want to put the novel down until you find out what happens to these two people. You can tell Ms Szeman has done some research for this book either in interviews or reading or both because she gets inside the soul of the two characters. I recommend this book for anyone who likes a book that stays with them forever. It is deeply moving. You will never forget the Kommandant nor his Mistress.

Sherri Szeman, in her novel, "The Kommandant's Mistress," takes one risk after another. She dares to play with time and setting, generally changing scenes and characters in the middle of a page, so that the reader must scramble to keep his bearings. The Kommandant of the title, Max von Walther, professes to despise Jews, and he kills them without compunction. Yet, he boldly takes a beautiful Jewish deportee into his office and his life, in spite of the protests of his furious wife. Szeman tells her story from various points of view, first from the viewpoint of the Kommandant, then from the viewpoint of his mistress, and finally from the "official viewpoint". Another daring move is Szeman's presentation of often horrifying events without much embellishment. She depicts the situtations as a series of snapshots, one after another, quickly and relentlessly. For example, Szeman depicts the Kommandant's daughter, Ilse, repeating the vicious Jew-hating comments that she hears from her elders, each word coming out like a horrible profanity from the mouth of an innocent child. In another scene, the Kommandant implores his mistress to take his gun and help him to commit suicide. Will she pull the trigger? The effect of this staccato narrative style is similar to a punch in the stomach. It is traumatizing to contemplate constantly changing scenarios of deportations, physical and mental torture, and murder. Szeman seems to be saying that there is no way to tell such a story in a linear way. Only by being cryptic and non-linear can one begin to capture the emotional trauma of events that are not within the scope of most people's experience. Szeman is a poet, as well as a novelist, and her novel at times approaches poetry in its tremendous emotional impact. I highly recommend this book to readers who are interested in Holocaust literature that is challenging and thought-provoking.

A strangely engrossing, uniquely structured book that provides different realities from different players. Pitting the most powerful male (a Nazi commander) against the least powerful female (a Jewish prisoner made mistress), Szeman presents an engrossing story of the atrocities of war, of man against man and especially of man against woman.

The Kommandant's Mistress is not a novel for everyone. The setting is an Auschwitz-like Concentration Camp, and the topic is not love, but power and survival. Yet inside this hellish environment, Sherri Szeman wonderfully depicts two people who use each other for survival and whose humanity peaks out from behind their grim roles.

The novel is divided into his story, followed by her story, ending with an obituary-like objective statement of the facts of their lives. Told in a stream of consciousness style that is freed from the constraints of time, the novel is in story fragments from disjointed periods of the characters' lives. The different pieces are hinged together with transition words, phrases, or concepts that strengthen the stream of consciousness feeling.

The author is at her best depicting the lies each person tells themselves to hide from the truth. Both her characters are poets who life has put in a place of unspeakable horror. They are drawn to each other out of survival and, by comparing their stories, the reader is shown how each has twisted the truth to live.

The book ends with an Author's Note that lists a three page bibliography of sources used in the writing. A difficult, but ultimately rewarding and original first novel that is firmly based in the historic period. Szeman succeeds in bringing both characters to life and giving them a voice.

I loved this novel. It was written in a different fashion with various 'scenes' mixed together, one leading to another, but I enjoyed it after I got used to the writing style. It is the story of the commandant of a concentration camp and the beautiful young Jewish woman he made his mistress.

The novel was written in three parts: the first part was written from the Kommandant's perspective; the second part was written in thel Jewish woman's perspective; and the third part was their obituaries.

In addition to 'Those Who Save Us' by Jenna Blum, this is one of my favorite works of fiction concerning the Third Reich.

I give it 2 and half stars. I was confused by the style of writing. It would just jump from one scene to another without letting you know when it was going to happen and the author did it alot. I did not like that. The book had the potential to be better but because of the writing it wasn't and I feel they was things lacking especially with the characters. I'm surprised I got through this quickly. Good thing I got this book for very cheap.

This, a tale of a Nazi concentration camp commandant and his sexual subjugation of a Jewish inmate, is ultimately nothing more than a cliched romance novel masquerading as middle-brow literature. All the Harlequin cliches are here; Rachel, the Jewish inmate, is not just passably good-looking, she is, as the "official" biography at the end tells us, "a renowned beauty", and her captor is similarly "exceedingly physically attractive". Well, naturally, because there wouldn't be as much melodramatic potential if they were exceedingly non-remarkable individuals, and while one could argue that it was because of her looks that the commandant grew infatuated with her, it still seems to me a little too stock-in-trade when it comes to the stereotypes of cheesy romance novels.

Written in two first person narratives with biographical sketches at the end, the structure is jarring and provides no momentum to the plot, nor any depth to the characters; the reader is ultimately left with many pieces of the puzzle but no key as to how to put them together. Truth be told I haven't read a stylistic mishmash like this with the Holocaust as subject matter since DM Thomas' "White Hotel".

In turns cliched, clumsily written and over-wrought, I'd recommend giving this one a miss. Liliana Cavani did this first and better with her film "The Night Porter", a far more convincing and original portrayal of sexual obsession between a Nazi officer and Jewish concentration camp inmate; I'd also recommend Ka-Tzetnik's novels "House of Dolls" and "Atrocity" for a more viscerally realistic and harrowing view of sex as an instrument of survival during this insane and dark period of history.

I have not finished the book yet but I can say it is the most confusing of any book I have ever read. The author switches scenes so quickly and you can read one sentence to the next and nothing makes sense. In one instance he is playing with his daughter and the next sentence yelling at his adjutant. You wonder how he goes from home, hotel and death camp within the same paragraph. I am still attempting to read it but it would be nice if she had written one chapter about home, the next about hotel, then work something to have made it flow better. Its as if the author has a serious case of ADD.