Annihilation

Nearly bereft of dialogue, this daring, beautifully understated experimental novel recreates a single day in the life of a Polish-Jewish town doomed to be destroyed in the Holocaust. On this single day in 1934 nothing much happens: children play; a lawyer visits a prostitute; cheerful Hasidim dance in the streets; merchants, policeman and citizens go about their business. Although the Nazis are nowhere in sight, the townsfolk's premonitory dreams hint of disaster to come. In meticulously re-creating an ordinary day, the omniscient voice of the narrator consecrates the everyday reality of a world he wishes to save from annihilation. Seemingly trivial events--a Gypsy reading fortunes, a rooster's crowing--take on momentous import given the horrific foreknowledge that the town will one day be obliterated. The smooth translation conveys the elegiac tone and underlying tension of Polish novelist Szewc's jolting first novel. (Oct.)