KEEP SAYING THEIR NAMES

Though its stated goal is to preserve the story of Hirsch Komissar, the author's wife’s Jewish great-grandfather and the owner of a thriving boutique in Trondheim, Norway, before the German invasion in April 1940, Stranger’s fact-based novel is more a portrait of one of the collaborators who abetted the process of killing hundreds of that country’s Jews and others during the Holocaust. Arrested by the Germans in January 1942 for the offense of spreading news from the BBC, Hirsch is executed later that year in a Norwegian labor camp. Meanwhile, following his recruitment by the Nazis shortly after the invasion, Norwegian Henry Oliver Rinnan, the source of the information leading to Hirsch's arrest, skillfully infiltrates the nation’s resistance network and, with his accomplices, runs a ruthless interrogation operation out of a house that came to be known as the “Gang Monastery.” In an ironic twist, when Hirsch’s son and his family return from Sweden to Trondheim in 1948, they move into the former torture headquarters, where grisly evidence of Rinnan’s cruelty remains. Stranger employs an unusual storytelling technique, labeling each section with a letter of the alphabet, followed by a series of words—“A for accusation. A for arrest. A for all that will disappear and slide into oblivion”—that launches him into the pieces of nonchronological narrative that compose the novel. Not for lack of interest in Hirsch’s story, but seemingly more because of the better-documented record of Rinnan’s treachery and brutality, the novel’s focus shifts, gradually but unmistakably, to become the chronicle of an amoral man, motivated to kill by little more than greed, lust, and a desire for revenge for the torment inflicted on him as a child because of his small physical stature and his rural family’s poverty. While he doesn’t lack for vivid scenes, Rinnan never comes close to qualifying as a truly complex or tragic figure, and the tragedy of Hirsch’s death never fully comes to life.

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