Sunken red

Two epigraphs introduce this wrenching novel. One is taken from Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe: "But in his accustomed way, wrapping himself in mystery, he looked at me wide-eyed, and said these words: 'The mothers! Mothers! How marvellous that sounds!'" The other is from "The Song of the Dead," from the South Celebes: "Seek me while I am here. Know me because I am here. I am here. And yet it is certain that I am not here." These flashes of dark light, the alternating current of love and estrangement, are the pulses that have molded an artist and blasted a life. It is clear that the narrator's story of imprisonment with his mother in a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War -- five years old, exploring the camp on a single skate, with an adult's sun helmet hiding his head and at the same time making him recognizable from afar as he absorbs his world of degradation and death -- is the author's own story, and indeed the story of many of his generation. Strange, and strangely exalting to have made art out of the memory of horror, with a spirit crippled by loss. Strange that a loveless life as an older child in Holland, as a young man, as a man no longer young, can, on the death of the mother from whom he had separated himself, raise this paean to what was missing, and bestow the self-knowledge that lets him glimpse the shape of that woman's spirit and her tragedy.