Brodeck’s Report is one of those slightly deceptive books, set in an undefined, postwar village in a country which is never stated. The writing includes the use of a foreign language which feels like a variant on German. The village has its own language, as well as its customs and its sins and its secrets. It is narrated by Brodeck, a man who was sent to a concentration camp and lived to tell the tale, only to return to his village to find that the evil is still present. Brodeck is commissioned by the village elders to write a report about the killing of a mysterious stranger who has descended on the village for no obvious reason and whose understanding of the village’s crimes eventually provokes a violent, fatal response. The novel is constantly allusive, swathed in mystery and a certain mysticism. In the closing notes the writer acknowledges the work of Primo Levi. The use of the holocaust as a literary device is always problematic and in Brodeck’s Report, it engenders a certain unease. The descriptions of Brodeck’s time in the camp feel sketchy, relying on the power of images, whose power perhaps never feels as compelling as they ought to, to describe the evil they represent. That these images are then juxtaposed against similar images from the village leaves the reader in an awkward position: should the reader interpret the villagers’ actions as equivalent to those of the Nazis? Or is the book saying that all middle European societies have inevitable Nazi tendencies? The book’s poeticism only seems to shroud these issues in more confusion.
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