“A masterpiece”: For a novel to receive such praise no doubt is a publicist’s dream and often enough an author’s too, yet the penchant among reviewers for dubbing a new release with the weighty honorific must raise an eyebrow. It’s a type of soothsaying, really, since who can know what the future will hold, how the ultimate context for the work will grow, except a visionary — and how, in our data-saturated moment, can anyone make claims of visionary insight without a pyramid of spreadsheets to rely on? By dint of overuse, ‘masterpiece’ begins to seem less a marker of gravitas or achievement and more a tired commercial nicety. So it becomes an art of its own, a sense for when, critically speaking, to make such a claim.

Jim Shepard’s seventh novel, The Book of Aron, arrives to just such praise. It’s right there on the jacket copy, a heralding trumpet. Furthermore, The Book of Aron figures as Holocaust fiction, that populous family of stories championed by awards-minded filmmakers and, on special occasion, the would-be literary memoirist. No pressure, but what could Shepard possibly add to the voluminous historical record?

The Book of Aron follows a less than devout Jewish country boy recently arrived in Warsaw. Early on, Shepard’s Aron speaks with comic pathos, the sort known to a middle child of a family doing more with less. A bookish loner, this boy’s emotional horizon is informed by the travails of a younger brother with bad lungs until one day “my father told me to get up because it was war and the Germans had invaded. I didn’t believe him, so he pointed at the neighbors’ apartment and said, ‘Come to the radio, you’ll hear it.’” The utter matter-of-factness of the arriving army is chilling for what we know it will bring. Yet Aron does not know, not right away; he has other things on his mind. The dynamic happens to be signature Shepard, tension between the personal and the political written large — or written close to home. Shepard’s brisk, laconic narratives tend to cleave to a protagonist participating in, but unable to fathom the full breadth of, a historical moment.

No doomy portentous cloud here, no melodramatic gestures at sweeping profundity. Nobody thanks an Oskar Schindler. Even as the real horrors encroach, Aron finds adventure and thrills as a smuggler among a gang of smugglers. Until even the last shred of normality is taken from him, he’s busy being a boy, doing what he needs to do to feed himself. To borrow from Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Aron tells his story walking.

Like Schindler’s List, The Book of Aron is haunted by a great man, in this case, Janusz Korczak, the pediatrician famous throughout Europe and appointed caretaker for a set of Jewish orphans. Central to the lives of saints, the act of bearing witness — to Korczak, to the struggles of friends and family — is performed by a boy who is not a model of moral purity, even as the occupiers’ crimes dwarf his own. Wracked by guilt, Aron needs to believe in Korczak. And Korczak knows it.

Shepard’s no sap, and his hunger for certified historic fact is voluminous, practically what underlies his entire literary career. As in another of his most impressive works-to-date, a short story titled “The Netherlands Lives with Water” set in Holland of a not-so-distant-future, inundated by relentlessly climbing ocean levels, the characters in The Book of Aron find themselves practicing “a sort of apocalyptic utilitarianism: on the one hand they were sure everything was going to hell in a handbasket, while on the other they continued to operate as if things could be turned around with a few practical measures.” In many ways, The Book of Aron is the wallop of a novella that could have brought story collection and previous Shepard work You Think That’s Bad to a close. (Call it ‘You Think There’s Anything Worse?’) The Holocaust is the Holocaust is the Holocaust, but Shepard’s interests have pointed him in its direction for some time now.

Counterpoised by, say, Primo Levi’s The Drowned and The Saved or Imre Ketesz’s Fatelessness, The Book of Aron brings narrative light to a historical chapter saturated by complete darkness. Save those who escaped before the last march, no recorded survivors emerged from Korczak’s orphanage. Out of consideration for his fame, the Germans repeatedly gave Dr. Korczak the chance to save himself by leaving his kids behind. He would not.

Marching to the train depot, the children perform a rendition of a song called “Though the Storm Howls Around Us.”

In place of the actual lyrics, Aron reports: “I started to sing my younger brother’s name.”

The Book of Aron

by Jim Shepard

According to Benjamin Paloff, translator of Richard Weiner’s The Game for Real, “anyone who claims not to be a bit bewildered by writers like Richard Weiner is inherently untrustworthy.” Weiner, an early twentieth century Czech writer who spent the majority of his writing career in Paris, is a demanding stylist. His prose is densely imagistic, glutted with long sentences sutured together by flights into surreal dreamscapes. He uses this byzantine style to replicate interiority and explore our assumptions about the nature of identity. The Game for Real is filled with doppelgangers and strangers, with false accusations and staged conversations, and with characters who ceaselessly and vainly chase reality.

The book is split into two novellas. The first, “The Game for Quartering,” is a close-first person account of paranoia and inauthenticity. An unnamed bachelor and “hack” leaves a Paris Metro station and is followed home by the train’s only other passenger. This passenger might be an acclaimed Spanish dancer — or, he might merely resemble that dancer. It might be the narrator’s friend, Fuld. At home, things get even weirder: an unidentified woman waits at the narrator’s door. The ambiguities mount when the novella shifts to an earlier episode at a café, where the narrator and three friends sit at a table surrounded by “supernumeraries” watching them talk:

The supernumeraries — that is, the guests of this sanctuary, which is both a tavern and a knightly hall — won’t let us out of their sight for a moment . . . as far as I was concerned, that circumstance contributed decisively to the impression that we were acting before what one calls fate, which also likes to pretend that it’s a disinterested observer.

This short passage displays Weiner’s commitment to minutia. As the narrator qualifies his assertions about the venue — supernumeraries are generalized back to guests; the “sanctuary,” in the course of a clause, becomes a tavern and knightly hall — we feel the mind trying to make sense of the unfamiliar. Description, here, is an attempt to explain the inexplicable.

The presence of fate, at the café, contributes to the narrator’s growing sense of paranoia. The other characters all know more than he does, but what they know, exactly, remains unclear. Weiner uses playwriting techniques in these café scenes to further enhance the narrator’s feeling that they are acting before an audience, living up to preordained roles. The text adopts the look of script, and the repeated use of personal direction forces us to wonder who, exactly, is directing the characters. Is it Weiner, the writer? Or is that falsely disinterested observer, Fate, shaping the plot?

“The Game for the Honor of Payback,” the book’s second section, is an equally elliptical exploration of identity and psychology. Whereas “The Game for Quartering” progresses into the dreamlike world of the café, “The Game for the Honor of Payback” begins in a dream in which the protagonist swims through a “subterranean tunnel and against a foul current.” Things don’t get much better when he awakens. Staying at a small inn, the protagonist — the closest thing we get to a name is “Shame” — is accused of stealing a bracelet belonging to innkeeper’s wife.

After the innkeepers ask him to leave, what follows is an impressionistic account of an outsider’s excursion through Paris. As the novella progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to parse out what is real and what is imagined. Like the narrator in “The Game for Quartering,” “Shame” is obsessively self-conscious:

Why does he [protagonist] say, “If I had pinched it,” “If I had chucked it” . . .? Why does he say this when he knows that in order for him to pinch, in order for him to chuck, he would have to be . . . precisely: not himself, but rather a fundamentally different person.

Weiner deconstructs language to question identity. How can we use language flexibly, hypothetically, when doing so puts language at odds with identity? In Weiner’s work, no phrase is taken for granted. Every image, every particle, every thought, and every shift in personality. Characters are split into temporary selves: “the sinister Zinaida; The Zinaida of early evening; the Zinaida shuffling toward the table . . . the Zinaida carrying a writing pad.” His world demands our attention: “Look! Don’t you hear the heads of their unfurled offensive lines twist suddenly, charmingly, skirting a kind of magnetic focal point, languidly and in vain?”

Though Weiner was highly influenced by the surrealists, his close readings of Marcel Proust, as a reviewer living in Paris, seems to have had a major impact on his depiction of life. Weiner understood, like many of the Moderns, that the future direction of literature was the fluctuation of thought. It is a testament to Weiner’s skill that the impressionistic dreamscapes of 1930s Paris remain as fresh today as they were when he wrote these novellas. And Paloff deserves a great deal of credit, too, for preserving the wit, complexity, and beauty of Weiner’s sentences: the nights are so dark they “stain clothes;” skies “crackle” with stars. It’s unfortunate that English readers had to wait eighty years for The Game for Real to appear. These novellas are intense, funny, and vivid explorations of selfhood and identity. Their publication was long overdue.

The Game for Real

by Richard Weiner