From Anne Frank to gannets

By Maggie Fergusson

FICTION

Hope: a Tragedy by Shalom Auslander, Picador, hardback, out now. The Holocaust is still claiming victims: that’s the hypothesis here, and Shalom Auslander’s astonishing achievement is to explore it in a way that’s hilarious and disturbing, but never tasteless. Beset with bred-in-the-bone neuroses about concentration camps, a 21st-century salesman, Solomon Kugel, moves his family to a town “famous for nothing”—only to discover, living in his attic, the elderly, incontinent Anne Frank, rejected by publishers whose profits depend on her being “Miss Holocaust 1945”, and dead. Should he kill her? Or cosset her? In describing Kugel’s vacillations, which swing between hangdog self-pity and foul-mouthed fury at the power of the past, the author seems to be teasing out his own conflicting feelings. “It’s funny,” the book begins and ends—and it is, very. But Auslander’s not joking.