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Books

The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis's best for 25 years

<p class="p1">He has done his subject justice. The final release for the reader is an almost physical relief</p>

16 August 2014

9:00 AM

16 August 2014

9:00 AM

The Zone of Interest Martin Amis

Cape, pp.320, £18.99, ISBN: 9780224099745

‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,’ wrote Hannah Arendt of Adolf Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, Eichmann was certified as ‘normal’ by half a dozen psychiatrists. On more than one occasion in Martin Amis’s troubling new novel one of its main characters, the fictionalised commandant of a thinly disguised Auschwitz, declares himself ‘completely normal’.

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