ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the ways in which some recent fiction represents the Holocaust, the event which, even after Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, seems to stand, at least in the West, as the paradigm of atrocity. Michaels's recent Orange Prize-winning novel, Fugitive Pieces, will be the main focus of this essay. Christopher Hope's Serenity House is a black comedy in which Max Mountfalcon, an 'ethnologist' who worked in the Nazi camps, ends up in an old peoples' home in Britain. Helen Lewis and Binjamin Wilkimorski have recently published testimonies which differ radically in their mode of bearing witness. Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces is a moving, poetic meditation upon love, loss, memory and time clearly based on extensive research in Holocaust history and survivor testimony. Eve's Tattoo signals the difficulty of preventing the Holocaust from becoming remote and apparently irrelevant 'history' without reducing its specificity and implying that we are all, and equally, potential victims.
