Word: verhaeghen
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...what if he were right? Flemish author Paul Verhaeghen explores that possibility - and galaxies of others - in Omega Minor, his sprawling, provocative, nuclear nightmare of a novel. After appearing in the Netherlands and his native Belgium in 2004, and Germany in 2006, the book spent months on best-seller lists and won a periodic table of European literary awards. Verhaeghen gained further notoriety by declining his prize money to protest the Bush Administration's conduct of the Iraq...
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...
That is putting it gently. Much as Einstein struggled toward the end of his life to fashion a Grand Unified Theory explaining the entire cosmos, Verhaeghen links Nazism, the Holocaust, the nuclear age and the fall of communism in a grand web of causality and suspense. Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, Speer, Heisenberg, Honnecker and Gorbachev strut and fret through hot war and cold. The action ricochets back and forth from the '30s to the '90s, from Potsdam to Los Alamos to Auschwitz to post-Wall Berlin, where neo-Nazis are plotting an apocalypse that could put new zip in Einstein...
...sounds like an airport spy thriller, except for the primers in quantum mechanics and cognitive psychology, plus some intellectually ambitious musings on sex (the book has lots of it), memory and the uses of history. Though Verhaeghen has been writing novels for more than a decade, fiction is not his 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...
...Verhaeghen has fun with academic jargon, but his writing is otherwise topologically stable. Channeling Grass and the magic realists, he has a kids' TV magician overseeing construction of the Berlin Wall, and a cat mediating Andermans' love life. Of the university dining hall, Andermans notes: "Friday's pizza was not a food item but a search engine, topped with the mercilessly burnt memories of everything that had been on the past week's menu." De Heer, describing a bombed-out house, is equally vivid: "On a metal table in one of the rooms I spot a typewriter, the type bars...