Dry Danube: Novel

The Dry Danube, Paul West's nineteenth novel, is a uniquely daring, dazzling, bravura performance by an acknowledged master. The Dry Danube, presents Hitler's "memoir" of the years he spent as a failed art student in Vienna, just before World War One. Each of the book's four parts is a solid raving block of barbaric flourishes, free of paragraphing in its headlong rush of disgorged spleen. "I wanted to get at H. before the violence sets in," West remarked: "But most of all I wanted to get the motion of his mind, as seen by another." Hitler spews his rage over his blighted career and his desperate wooing of Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, "proud famous painters both." These "two men so important in my young life, yet so aloof from me," he tries to befriend, though "I would have had more success groveling before a statue of Frederick the Great or Charlemagne." ("These men do not so much control Art, they are Art. It makes you sick to think of it.") A risky venture, The Dry Danube stands a triumph -- baroque, chilling ("This was not the last the world would hear of me"), and scathingly humorous at the same instant.