Word: minor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Omega Minor has now finally arrived in the U.S. and Britain, the first of Verhaeghen's three novels to be translated into English. Critics are comparing him to such German masters as Günter Grass and W. G. Sebald, as well as to science-minded American novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Richard Powers. Indeed, Powers - who has lived in Holland - helped find a U.S. publisher for the book, calling it "amazing" and praising Verhaeghen for taking on "the whole 20th century in a single novel...
...primary solar system. He is a cognitive psychologist of some renown, newly relocated from Syracuse University to Atlanta's Georgia Tech. Most of his writings appear in such journals as Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, with enticing titles like "Aging and the Stroop Effect: A Meta-Analysis." He wrote Omega Minor in his spare time. When English rights were sold, he did the translation himself, all 695 pages...
...Omega Minor screams to the heavens when it confronts the Holocaust, perceptively recounted thorough De Heer's eyes. The Nazis "are not killing a people," De Heer posits. "What they want is to turn back modernity, get rid of rationality and its twin brother uncertainty." Recounting Germany's demented diversion of resources from the war effort to the extermination camps, right up to the end, De Heer concludes that Nazism's defining goal was the Holocaust, not all that Wagnerian nonsense about Reich and glory. Yet he concedes: "History is the lie people tell to give meaning to their pasts...
...Omega Minor was born of curiosity about a past that Verhaeghen, 42, never knew. "I was doing a postdoc at Potsdam in 1995," he recalls, moments before leaving his Atlanta home for a psychology conference in California. "I took the train to Berlin and emerged at Mitte, the center of old East Berlin. I found myself alone on this huge square, except for a strange glow coming from a glass plate in the pavement. There was a small white underground chamber lined with empty bookshelves. On it was that famous [Heinrich] Heine quote, 'Where they burn books, they will...
...heart is in psychology. He is finishing a book on aging and memory for Oxford University Press, so fiction must wait. "I'm completely exhausted. Omega Minor said it all; I have nothing left." Still, Verhaeghen finds his new surroundings intriguing. "Atlanta is a different kind of history - the Civil War, the civil-rights movement. Things are starting to move in my mind. If you see me in a seedy part of town, don't panic. I'll just be doing research...