Pamela Paul: Novels like 1933's 'The Oppermans' are simultaneously very much of their time and yet almost clairvoyant about the future. 'It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week.'
A copy of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns" in New York, on Oct. 6, 2022. "Reading is like staring into the worst of next week," writes the New York Times columnist Pamela Paul.The power of some classic realist novels, like Émile Zola’s “Germinal” and John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” lies in the way they wholly capture their era.
Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” which is being rereleased this month with a revised translation of James Cleugh’s original by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, is one of those books. It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week. It’s all there: The ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth.
“How do you know when to sound the alarm?” asked Cohen, who also wrote an introduction to the new edition, when I reached him by phone on book tour in Italy. It’s easy to slam someone for overreacting, he explained. But we would do well to remember the instances in which a strong reaction is justified: “There’s an enormous bravery that comes with writing about the present, an enormous risk and an enormous thrill.
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