by Nir Baram
It's late 1938.
Thomas Heiselberg has built a career in Berlin as a market researcher for an American advertising company.
In Leningrad, twenty-two-year-old Sasha Weissberg has grown up eavesdropping on the intellectual conversations in her parents' literary salon.
They each have grand plans for their lives. Neither of them thinks about politics too much, but after catastrophe strikes they will have no choice.
Thomas puts his research skills to work elaborating Nazi propaganda. Sasha persuades herself that working as a literary editor of confessions for Stalin's secret police is the only way to save her family.
When destiny brings them together, they will have to face the consequences of the decisions they have made.
Nir Baram's Good People has been showered with praise in many countries. With its acute awareness of the individual amid towering historical landscapes, it is a tour de force: sparkling, erudite, a glimpse into the abyss.
Nir Baram was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. He began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels, including The Remaker of Dreams, Good People and World Shadow. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister's Award for Hebrew Literature. Text will publish a work of reportage by Nir Baram in 2017.
'Written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity...it expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes.' Amos Oz
'One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today.' Haaretz
'Good People rewards the reader's patience while mining a tragic sense of irony that extends all the way to its title.' Big Issue
'Baram uses intense geographical plotting and is chillingly eloquent...[Good People] is tremendous. I read it in two sittings and I learned a lot. How does a man in his early 30s know how to write like this?' Australian
'Good People is a richly textured panorama of German and Russian life...This ample novel lives most memorably through Baram's vignettes of people, dwellings, cities, landscapes and the like that seem to lie, at times, at the periphery of its central concerns.' Age/Sydney Morning Herald
'A groundbreaker...Riveting reading.' Qantas Magazine
'Good People is the tale of ordinary, middle-class lives sucked into a moral maelstrom. It is compulsive and profoundly disturbing.' Sunday Star Times
'Astonishingly powerful...[A] compelling, important story.' New Zealand Listener
'Chillingly captures the terrors and tensions of life under Stalin and Hitler. The chapters set in Russia are particularly effective, carrying the suspense of a spy thriller. Nir Baram explores the frightening speed and ease with which ordinary people become functionaries in totalitarian societies.' TLS
'Good People is a subtle, original, and fascinating take on the wartime story. We forget that the brutality was as much a bureaucratic effort as a military one. We forget that even the most massive, most evil forces are comprised of moving human parts. If Good People has a moral, it is this: the totalitarian state will attempt to possess the individual by co-opting his (relatively innocent) instincts—ambition,...
It's late 1938.
Thomas Heiselberg has built a career in Berlin as a market researcher for an American advertising company.
In Leningrad, twenty-two-year-old Sasha Weissberg has grown up eavesdropping on the intellectual conversations in her parents' literary salon.
They each have grand plans for their lives. Neither of them thinks about politics too much, but after catastrophe strikes they will have no choice.
Thomas puts his research skills to work elaborating Nazi propaganda. Sasha persuades herself that working as a literary editor of confessions for Stalin's secret police is the only way to save her family.
When destiny brings them together, they will have to face the consequences of the decisions they have made.
Nir Baram's Good People has been showered with praise in many countries. With its acute awareness of the individual amid towering historical landscapes, it is a tour de force: sparkling, erudite, a glimpse into the abyss.
Nir Baram was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. He began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels, including The Remaker of Dreams, Good People and World Shadow. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister's Award for Hebrew Literature. Text will publish a work of reportage by Nir Baram in 2017.
'Written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity...it expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes.' Amos Oz
'One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today.' Haaretz
'Good People rewards the reader's patience while mining a tragic sense of irony that extends all the way to its title.' Big Issue
'Baram uses intense geographical plotting and is chillingly eloquent...[Good People] is tremendous. I read it in two sittings and I learned a lot. How does a man in his early 30s know how to write like this?' Australian
'Good People is a richly textured panorama of German and Russian life...This ample novel lives most memorably through Baram's vignettes of people, dwellings, cities, landscapes and the like that seem to lie, at times, at the periphery of its central concerns.' Age/Sydney Morning Herald
'A groundbreaker...Riveting reading.' Qantas Magazine
'Good People is the tale of ordinary, middle-class lives sucked into a moral maelstrom. It is compulsive and profoundly disturbing.' Sunday Star Times
'Astonishingly powerful...[A] compelling, important story.' New Zealand Listener
'Chillingly captures the terrors and tensions of life under Stalin and Hitler. The chapters set in Russia are particularly effective, carrying the suspense of a spy thriller. Nir Baram explores the frightening speed and ease with which ordinary people become functionaries in totalitarian societies.' TLS
'Good People is a subtle, original, and fascinating take on the wartime story. We forget that the brutality was as much a bureaucratic effort as a military one. We forget that even the most massive, most evil forces are comprised of moving human parts. If Good People has a moral, it is this: the totalitarian state will attempt to possess the individual by co-opting his (relatively innocent) instincts—ambition,...
Reviews-
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August 29, 2016
In Berlin in early 1939, a famous radio broadcaster at a party is asked about the political climate: "I work very closely with the Minister of Propaganda," he assures partygoers, "and I can guarantee that Germany is doing everything it can to avoid war." Thomas Heiselberg, the protagonist in this dense novel, hears the claim but knows far too much to be convinced. Instead, Thomas feels "the familiar weakness... People became shadows. Everything blurred." He's terrified by the events unfolding around him, including the violent murder, in his own home, of a Jew who'd previously worked for his family and returned, unbidden, to care for his mother. Neither generous nor immoral, Thomas, who at least initially works for an American company, tries to stay alive, travelling from Warsaw to Lublin in the process. Not dissimilar to Thomas in nature is Sasha, a young Russian woman in Leningrad in 1938, whose parents have not returned from their most recent interrogation and who then finds herself faced with the choice, as her future husband puts it, to "die or become another person." The book follows Thomas and Sasha in alternating chapters as they become more entangled in the parties they remain determined to neither support nor oppose. As promising as the setup sounds, the narrative is difficult to navigate. Readers will find that the opening dramatis personae of 31 characters in five cities is only the beginning, and that there are, in fact, far more names and positions and connections to keep track of. This breadth reflects Baram's tremendous knowledge, but the story is ineffective and diffuse, as even Thomas and Sasha become as blurry as Thomas's fear. -
July 1, 2016
A German market researcher in Nazi Germany and the daughter of literary dissidents employed by the NKVD in Stalin's USSR are brought face to face with the consequences of their actions.The German, Thomas Heiselberg, gets a job for the German branch of an American advertising company. His research brings him to the attention of the Nazis, who are planning the invasion of Poland. Sasha Weissberg, whose parents have been taken away by Stalin's secret police, gets a job interrogating dissidents, some of them people she grew up listening to in her parents' salon. The novel means to investigate the vanity of believing that personal ambition can stay free of history and politics. The period is the uncertain months before the rupture of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, in other words a time ripe for self-delusion. But a fertile period of history does not immediately translate into compelling fiction. Both the protagonists are rather blah, the sort that history tends to describe as "functionaries." Nor does their ultimate intersection provide any dramatic impulse to a novel that is clearly serious in intent and execution but turgid. As slogs go, this is not the siege of Leningrad. But it'll do.COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
