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The Czech writer Jáchym Topol's novel is like a modern Dracula: full of Gothic horror that aims to frighten you to your senses and make you pay attention to history and its very real scars. The narrator, whose Uncle Lebo is a survivor of the Terezín camp, finds himself running a tourist attraction in a former Nazi transit prison for many who ended up in gas chambers. (The tourist can buy ghetto pizza and Kafka T-shirts to mark the visit.) His success leads to confrontation with the authorities at home, who wish to stage-manage all wartime commemoration to suit their own political agenda, and, amazingly, jealousy from Belarusians who kidnap him for his rich western contacts. They have their own ghoulish plans to build the Devil's Workshop, "a Jurassic Park of horror", in their own country to attract tourists and their money. After all, they argue, more people were killed in Belarus than were killed in Czechoslovakia, and it's only right that survivors there should get some of the action . . .
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