A review by wanderer222
House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon

4.0

I tend to avoid holocaust novels (so depressing), and I might not have picked this up had I known what it was about. I'm glad I did, however. This novel, to me, perfectly captures the feeling of walking through Germany (or Amsterdam, in this case), and trying to reconcile the modern, bustling society with the genocide that occurred there during WWII. The main character is a famous Israeli writer who goes to Amsterdam to research his family's history. As he does so, he writes a novelization of his mother's experience as a Jew living in Amsterdam during the Holocaust. As the story progresses, I began to find the holocaust narrative more interesting than the primary story, but the stylized shifting between past and present was a cool literary technique. The writing style could be a little tedious at times--the author is constantly describing the setting in rich (sometimes unnecessary) detail, so you learn about what color everyone's ties are or what kind of soup they're eating--but I got used to it after a while and found myself more immersed, especially after the first three hours or so of the audiobook version.