The Pages

March 21, 2022
A first edition of Austrian Jewish writer’s Joseph Roth’s Rebellion, a “short novel about a barrel organ player who lost his leg in the First World War,” serves as the narrator of this intriguing mystery from Hamilton (Dublin Palms). The book, published in 1924, introduces itself in the present as part of the luggage of Lena Knecht, an artist flying from New York to Berlin, the place where Rebellion was written. Lena, who has discovered that someone has drawn a map on a blank page at the back depicting a bridge, a path, a forest, and a farm, hopes to find information in Berlin that will unlock the map’s secret meaning. The theft of her handbag with the book inside complicates her quest. Hamilton makes buy-in to his conceit easy as he alternates between sections centered on the intrigue surrounding the map and flashbacks to Roth’s life and his experiences under the Nazis, who burned copies of Rebellion and forced him to flee Germany in 1933. The pacing and prose are first-rate. This unusual storytelling choice works better than most mysteries told from the perspective of an intelligent animal.