My dialogue examples are probably more awkward than most of the book. Having said that, this is a novel of raw emotion not delicate prose.

It seems a subject which so easily lends weight to a book, weight that often isn’t deserved. I read a while back V, by Pynchon, which explores (among many other things) how a war of genocide in Africa against the Herero people became a dry-run for the Holocaust. Without in any way diminishing the horror of what was to come in the 1930s and ’40s it showed how there had already been an experiment in exterminating a people using death camps and medical experimentation (some carried out by Dr Mengele in fact).

That earned the weight of its subject matter, for me in part because it illustrated it in a way I hadn’t seen before. One can be too facile with these links (Pynchon later thought he’d gone perhaps too far in drawing parallels), but what Pynchon tried was to say something new about a subject that it’s hard to talk about at all.

This sounds, well, a touch worthy. Educational even. Does he bring anything that wouldn’t be better received by reading accounts of actual survivors?

On another note, I wasn’t particularly persuaded by the dialogue you quoted. How did you find that side of things?

I am so glad to see that you reviewed this book. I was shattered after reading the NYT review. It just seemed like the reviewer read some other book all together, he completely missed the point. The Street Sweeper was one of my favourite books of last year, I found it incredibly powerful and very moving on so many levels. Yes, some of the scenes were very disturbing but how about the scene when Lamont recites the story of Mandelbrot in that small HR room of the hospital… I can’t remember when I book affected me so much, I have been carrying this story with me for months now.
This was my first book by Perlman but it will certainly not be the last.