Volume 42, Number 6 · April 6, 1995
Fish and Roses
By John Banville
The Monkey Link: A Pilgrimage Novel
by Andrei Bitov, translated by Susan Brownsberger
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 373 pp., $30.00
Among the more alarming lines of speculation the mind may entertain while trapped in Doctor Insomnia's waiting room is the question of what Europe would be like today if Hitler had won his war. There would be political unity of a kind, stretching from London (or even Dublin) to Sverdlovsk (or even Vladivostok), with innumerable local disturbances constantly flaring up, being suppressed, and flaring up again. The economy would be in continual crisis because of the arms race with America and the stultifying effect of ideological demands on management and workers alike. Officially, the Holocaust would not have happened unless one of Hitler's successors had decided for his own reasons to denounce the Führer at a closed session of the Nazi Party's annual conference; and intellectual life would be divided between the superstructure of a state-sanctioned mediocracy and the substructure of a vigorous but severely restricted, and isolated avant-garde.
Review, 3426 words
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