I går kunne man i Berlingske Tidende læse Jeppe Krogsgaard Christensens 
udmærkede avisartikel Bøger i brand, der med afsæt i Martin Amis‘ nye kontroversielle roman The Zone of Interest, tager et kig “på skandalens, forbuddets og censurens lange litteraturhistorie.” Amis’ bog, der angiveligt er en kærlighedshistorie mellem tyskere i Nazi-dødslejren over dem alle, Auschwitz, har udløst ret forskellige reaktioner. Nogle anmeldelser har været overstrømmende, imens andre har været mere kritiske. Iblandt dem den første anmeldelse jeg læste af romanen, skrevet af Michael Hofmanns i London Review of Books. Og ifølge Krogsgaard Christensen vil hverken Amis’ tyske eller franske forlag udgive bogen. Så bliver man jo alligevel lidt nysgerrig… Selvom Hofmanns anmeldelse nok holder mig tilbage for nu – for hvem gider at have spildt tiden med at læse nothing at all - men jeg tænkte: er der mon nogen af jer der har læst The Zone of Interest??? Hvad synes I?
Hofmanns anmeldelse begynder iøvrigt sådan her:
I read The Zone of Interest straight through twice from beginning to end and it feels like I’ve read nothing at all. I could read it again, if I thought it would make any difference. Perhaps in some strange way it’s a compliment to the book – this love story set among Germans in Auschwitz: good idea? waiting world? story whose time has come? yes? – or to its calculation, its finely calibrated scales, that what survives of it is (pace Larkin) nothing. That nothing finally preponderates, no sensation remains, no vision, no synthesis, no understanding. Amis has made everything somehow ‘come out even’: the historical substrates of the book (Wannsee, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Nuremberg, all alluded to) and its flimsy fictional superstructure; true extermination and flip invention; horrific fact and diligent if sketchy plotting. Surely it would have been wrong if either the bittersweet glow of freshly conceived romance or the grisly donnée of megadeath had prevailed: the one disrespectful to history, the other to art. And so the tawdry binary – life-death, life-death – stumbles on. It will be left to someone or other’s gorgeous music to provide either a lift or a settling for the Hollywood movie that will surely follow.