The Brooknerian

...their new cramped quarters. Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 3 Dispossession - 'translation' from one home to another lesser home - is a major theme from the beginning. As in Latecomers , the Holocaust - ghettoisation - isn't directly referenced, but nevertheless is present throughout, Brookner's reticence and subtlety only serving to intensify the Herzes' despair. The Next Big Thing , like Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks , is about the decline of a family, and there are sundry other comparisons to be drawn in this most literary of Brooknerian openers. Published the previous year, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz is possibly an influence. Reading of Herz and his family in Hilltop Road and later in their inferior flat above the shop in the Edgware Road, one thinks of Austerlitz in Bloomsbury:

'May' ( Visitors ) and indeed 'Brookner' ('Like calling yourself Batehoven!'*) were efforts at anglicisation, and not always successful. Brookner's Jews are identifiable, possibly, by their names; in other ways the information is no more than hinted at. It's seldom more explicit than: [Herz] was grateful that [his parents] had died naturally, in their own home, a fate denied to so many of their kind. The Next Big Thing , Ch. 9 In several of the early novels there is a contrast, a conflict, between the uncertain identity of the Jewish protagonist and the solidly Protestant object of her interest. The Haffenden interview explores this point. But in many of Anita Brookner's novels there's little or no mention of Judaism, and the lead characters have very English names: Elizabeth Warner, Alan Sherwood. Brookner described herself as 'a lapsed Jew - if such a thing were conceivable' (Haffenden). The Bruckners / Brookners had come to En...