richard zimler, the warsaw anagrams
“Imagine black dye running off into every memory. Nothing survives that isn’t grey.”
This is the especially nice thing that Zimler does, in a perfectly adequate historical mystery (that is, a little bit of a mixed bag, with an underdeveloped frame story and the weird dissonance of a small cast of characters in the overcrowded Warsaw Ghetto setting, but a strongly and specifically-developed hero at the center of things); it’s the second repetition of a metaphor, both in slightly different terms, but the gist is the same. Some experiences, the most terrible and most affecting, don’t just alter the present or the future; they even taint the past, transmuting memory, a notion Zimler uses gently and carefully.
