Not unlike the proverbial Hydra, the scourges of the 20th century are still with us: war, totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, violent and non-violent extremisms of many hues, racial hatred and intolerance, they are all there today—seemingly invincible. A political thriller and a historical novel at the same time, RED ROVER deals with some of them. Set in Poland in the 1970s, it aims at keeping certain important memories alive.

Even though incorporeal, a significant presence in the novel is the American poet John Berryman and his work, notably his unfinished sequence of poems The Black Book, dealing with Nazi atrocities in Poland during the Second World War. Berryman was unable to finish the cycle. His comment: “I just found I couldn’t take it. The sections published… are unrelievedly horrible.” (John Haffenden, Life of John Berryman, p. 206.) Written intermittently in the 1940s, The Black Book sequence anticipates and at the same time invalidates the opinion expressed by Adorno and others that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. What’s more, it touchingly proves that poetry can tackle any subject and in that particular case, among others, the concentration camp at Majdanek (Lublin) and its crematories. And Majdanek was like Auschwitz, smaller but no less gruesome.