Omega Minor in Time Europe

Nice to see Omega Minor getting some play. The feature is pretty interesting, and Morrison does a nice job summarizing the novel and its merits:

Omega Minor has now finally arrived in the U.S. and Britain, the first of Verhaeghen’s three novels to be translated into English. Critics are comparing him to such German masters as Günter Grass and W. G. Sebald, as well as to science-minded American novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Richard Powers. Indeed, Powers — who has lived in Holland — helped find a U.S. publisher for the book, calling it “amazing” and praising Verhaeghen for taking on “the whole 20th century in a single novel.”

That is putting it gently. Much as Einstein struggled toward the end of his life to fashion a Grand Unified Theory explaining the entire cosmos, Verhaeghen links Nazism, the Holocaust, the nuclear age and the fall of communism in a grand web of causality and suspense. Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, Speer, Heisenberg, Honnecker and Gorbachev strut and fret through hot war and cold. The action ricochets back and forth from the ’30s to the ’90s, from Potsdam to Los Alamos to Auschwitz to post-Wall Berlin, where neo-Nazis are plotting an apocalypse that could put new zip in Einstein’s abandoned idea.