After Dachau [Anglais] [Broché]

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.

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?)!

Muslim B