Omega Minor

by Paul Verhaeghen

Translated from the original Dutch by Paul Verhaeghen

Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charité, a Holocaust survivor tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Who is that talking cat, why do ghosts of SS soldiers roam the city, and what is Speer’s favorite actress up to? Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century—Berlin united and divided, Boston, Los Alamos, Auschwitz—Omega Minor is a novel of big ideas, a tale of survival of the soul cast in a whirlwind plot that is in turns smart, inquisitive, funny, violent, nutty, pornographic, moving, deeply compassionate, and profoundly moral. Or not.

Do scars ever heal? Can history be transcended? And will love, for once, save the world? Welcome to Omega Minor, where nothing is ever what it seems and nothing ever ends.

(From Publisher).

Omega Minor is Belgian novelist Paul Verhaeghen’s second novel, the first to be translated into English from his native Dutch. In 2006, the Flemish Government awarded it their Culture Award as the best work of Flemish fiction published between 2003 and 2005; the book also received the Dutch Bordewijk Award for Fiction. Verhaeghen has donated the money associated with these awards to civil and human rights organizations. He is also a cognitive psychologist, and is currently associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

An overwhelming masterpiece about survival and the madness of the twentieth century.