The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery

by Paul West

The Dry Danube , Paul West's nineteenth novel, is a uniquely daring, dazzling, bravura performance by an acknowledged master. The Dry Danube , presents Hitler's "memoir" of the years he spent as a failed art student in Vienna, just before World War One. Each of the book's four parts is a solid raving block of barbaric flourishes, free of paragraphing in its headlong rush of disgorged spleen. "I wanted to get at H. before the violence sets in," West "But most of all I wanted to get the motion of his mind, as seen by another." Hitler spews his rage over his blighted career and his desperate wooing of Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, "proud famous painters both." These "two men so important in my young life, yet so aloof from me," he tries to befriend, though "I would have had more success groveling before a statue of Frederick the Great or Charlemagne." ("These men do not so much control Art, they are Art. It makes you sick to think of it.") A risky venture, The Dry Danube stands a triumph -- baroque, chilling ("This was not the last the world would hear of me"), and scathingly humorous at the same instant.

Genres: Novels

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


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Reviews

[Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy interesting. It really spoke to the idea of artist as bearing the artist's burden, the Van Gogh exemplified. It serves as an interesting prelude to the grand atrocity. Portrays Hitler as human, which is scary and reassuring simultaneously.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars. Possibly 5 stars, if I were just a little smarter... (ro)