[images added by
this website] Garnet's
meta-textual and inter-textual weaving of
inflammatory neo-Nazi texts is, for the most
part, effective in fuelling X's rage and his
story.
 Toronto, Saturday, August 18, 2007
FICTION X versus
Z(ündel) IBI KASLIK August 18, 2007 - LOST,
Between
the Edges
- By
Eldon Garnet
- Semiotext(e),
300 pages, $15.95
-
Photo:
Ernst Zündel in a German courtroom, where
he was sentenced
to five years in jail for statements on a
California-based website
TORONTO writer Eldon
Garnet's second
experimental
novel, Lost: Between the Edges, features X,
a doctoral student in the University of Toronto
philosophy department, who is spurred to thwart
notorious
Holocaust
denier Ernst
Zündel. Zündel's infamy emerged in
the 1980s, in Toronto, when he published the
pamphlet Did Six Million Really
Die?  David
Irving comments: WHAT appalling,
barely-literate tripe. What is a newspaper
of the caliber of The Globe and
Mail doing, devoting space to
reviewing such a novel? I suppose they
need to pander to their major
advertisers.
One thing in the
novel is true: radical left-wingers
torched Ernst Zündel's Carlton
Street house in Toronto; not mentioned is
that they also sent him a bomb, which was
detected by the Canadian security
authorities, and which they cynically and
deliberately allowed Canada Post to
forward to him.
Not enough that our
tortured friend Ernst Zündel,
whatever his literary shortcomings, is now
condemned to serve five years on top of
the four years he has already sat in
German, American, and Canadian jails
awaiting trial, he now has to realise that
from the safety of the free world
pea-brained authors like this Canadian
novelist and the subsequent newspaper
reviewer are at liberty to taunt and
defame him, without his being able to
strike back. The reviewer says incidentally that my
opinion is that "Hitler was disconnected
from the reality of a systematic Jewish
genocide." Where does he find that kind of
Martian gibberish in my books?
I state quite bluntly:
There is no evidence Hitler knew about
Auschwitz. Nor
that he knew what Heinrich
Himmler was secretly up to. Nobody
has proved me wrong. And no amount of jail
time will persuade me to change that
opinion. Only wartime documents, hard and
genuine, will do that. And I have yet to
see one that does.
I had troubles of my own with
the Canadian Anti-Racist Action group
which features in this novel. They sent a
gang of thugs wielding baseball-bats to
smash up the restaurant I spoke in,
Stephanie's in West Fullerton Avenue, in
2000. The ARA group boasted about it on
their Canadian website afterwards. Several
members of my audience meeting for dinner
that evening, including no fewer than five
university professors, were injured by
broken glass.
So although my London home was
never burned down (an outrage for which we
were very prepared ), I know full well
what Zündel is feeling; thanks to my
website I am not entirely defenseless.
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There is something a bit Kafkaesque about
Lost, especially in terms of
characterization, or lack thereof. Beyond the
consonant name, and the fact that they are harassed
by authority, Garnet's X and Kafka's Josef K. do
have a few significant differences: Unlike Josef
K., whose only crime is his very existence, X
incites trouble by torching Zündel's Carlton
Street "headquarters of hate." Still, both Joseph
K. and X are anonymous, allegorical characters, who
represent ideas rather than people.The idea of
doing
something destructive to
Zündel's HQ first occurs to X when members of
his Anti-Racist Action group (ARA) inveigle their
way into Zündel's office under the pretense of
making a CBC documentary (and a documentary of the
documentary) on free speech: "The prospect of this
video was exciting to the entire group: a way to
both discover and reveal Zündel's world of
hate." Still unsatisfied with this abstract and modern
mode of critiquing Zündel, X decides to take
action by way of matches and gasoline. In terms of
story, what follows is X's attempt to evade police
capture, his slow physical deterioration and his
growing disillusionment with the act he has
committed. Interspersed with the slim chapters of the
novel's action are various lengthy documents that
deny the extent of the mass extermination of the
European Jewish population during the Second World
War. These documents include sections of Fred
Leuchter's
notorious gas chamber
report, which Zündel commissioned in order to
deny the existence of the chambers. Structurally, this documentation serves as
neo-Nazi agitprop; it's a counterpoint that fuels
X's growing obsession with destroying Zündel.
As well, the documents are obviously examples of
the kinds of literature in Zündel's
tendentious library: They are the very texts X
seeks to raze, texts like Zündel's Did Six
Million Really Die? Garnet's meta-textual and inter-textual weaving
of inflammatory neo-Nazi texts is, for the most
part, effective in fuelling X's rage and his story.
Less effective sections include documents regarding
Oklahoma
City bomber Timothy McVeigh, which seem
curiously out of place. At the end of the novel,
Garnet splices in a dense
section from the online Nizkor Project, excerpts
from the Nuremberg Trial, and a massive
interview section devoted to controversial
"historian" David Irving, who stated that
Hitler was disconnected from the reality of a
systematic Jewish genocide. In terms of style, the author's very clinical
prose is reminiscent of Camus's and Sartre's
detached manner of writing, and is pointedly
unnatural. For example, like his enemies, X thinks
in the didactic language of propaganda: "It has to
be done, what can't be expressed in written text
can be revealed in action," X tells himself on the
eve of his arson. Clearly, Garnet's book is an ideological novel
and therefore cannot really
be judged by the usual literary standards.
Unfortunately, no one, not even po-mo
experimentalists, can be excused for such an
overwhelming number of spelling mistakes and
punctuation problems. It is a shame Garnet's book
was not edited or proofed properly, as this
sloppiness undermines a complex book. Ibi Kaslik is the author of Skinny. Her new
novel, The Angel Riots, will be out next
spring.  
Our
dossier on Ernst Zündel-
Jewish
Telegraph Agency spread the smear that David
Irving supplied the Oklahoma City bomb
trigger
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