Panorama

Only recently available for the first time in English, "Panorama" is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, "Panorama" is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I-era Bohemia of Josef's youth, to a German boarding school full of creeping prejudice, through an infamous extermination camp, and finally to Josef's self-imposed exile abroad, achieving veracity and power through a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of our greatest modern masters. The author of six novels as well as the monumental account of his experiences in a Nazi labor camp, "Theresienstadt 1941-1945, " H. G. Adler is an essential author with unique historical importance. "Panorama" is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.