BTBA 2013: "The Canvas" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]

This one is a bitter pill to swallow . . . Way back in July of 2010, I wrote a post about “The Next German Book I Want to See Translated” featuring this video:

Well, two-plus years later, on my birthday, Open Letter brought out Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, a unique, very readable book about three main characters: two who are present in the book and have a showdown at the middle, and a third, who is mostly off-screen, but whose maybe-falsified memoir about the Holocaust sets this conflict in motion.

One of the interesting things about Stein that I learned during his extensive U.S. reading tour—which was insanely successful, and demonstrated just how much this book connected with readers—was that he appeared at a reading, and knows personally, Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of the fake Holocaust memoir, Fragments, which inspired this novel.

At each of his events, Benjamin would talk about how he wrote this as a way to deal with the idea of Wilkomirski, who created a fake identity for himself—the man’s not even Jewish—and came to completely incorporate this into his worldview and consciousness. It is an intriguing set-up for anyone interested in psychology or the power of fiction, and one that’s explored marvelously (in my opinion) in The Canvas.

But alas. No Best Translated Book Award for Benjamin and Brian.

You should still buy the book though. It’s damn amazing, and captivating from cover to cover.