Robert Eaglestone’s new book opens with a question posed by the Hungarian-born, Nobel Prize–winning author Imre Kertész: “Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?” Kertész continues saying that one “does not have to choose the Holocaust as one’s subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades” (1).1 To attend to this “broken voice” and help us understand the meaning of the Holocaust today, Eaglestone’s The Broken Voice examines five different discourses that treat this event—the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism, and kitsch.In the first chapter, Eaglestone analyzes the way the so-called Final Solution was regularly denied in Nazi Germany while at the same time remaining common knowledge—from this insight he derives the two parts of the concept, public and secret. Eaglestone reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) as a metaphor for the Holocaust—similarly to how Shoshana Felman interprets Albert Camus’s The Plague (New York: Routledge 1992)—and sees the novel’s clones corresponding with Jews and other “aliens.” The chapter ends with a parallel between three situations: the pogroms, the novel’s treatment of the clones, and the actions against immigrants in Great Britain, Eaglestone noting the contemporary public secret “which is hardly ever discussed” that refugees and immigrants “who are not criminals are deprived of their liberty” and held in interment centers (26–27). In this chapter, the Holocaust endures not only as a repetition of an attitude toward the other but, more importantly, as a repetition of the specific form of public discourse—the public secret—which is among the fine, detailed observations that The Broken Voice makes. In other words, the Holocaust is a model for an effective public denial, which brings together the supporters of the discriminatory policy and releases them from any responsibility.The next five chapters continue to demonstrate other ways in which obscuration works in tandem with violence. The second chapter focuses on the routinization of evil and the major source of Eaglestone’s analytic, Hannah Arendt—specifically her notion of evil, which Eaglestone applies to what he terms “perpetrator fiction.” Eaglestone explores how ordinary people can become perpetrators (by losing spontaneity, not engaging in self-dialogue) and shows the conceptual upheaval (in defining the concept of the human being) that the Holocaust effected. The evil is defined as “day-to-day, systematic work by ordinary human beings working within huge systems” that produces specific results for which the perpetrators do not take responsibility (39).As in the first chapter, the chief concepts discussed are tested through a reading of fiction which is meant to demonstrate and dramatize, as well as help us think through the issues at hand. Here, Eaglestone also faces a practical issue of criticism since so much literature about evil, from “Shakespeare’s Richard III to Milton’s Satan to Sauron and Voldemort” (39), is fascinated by it and presents wicked characters as extraordinary. Using Arendt’s paradigm, modern evildoers are supposed to be boring “nobodies,” but protagonists are, by definition, “somebodies.” Novels about them should “contain incomprehensible, boring, evasive, and rootless characters, and implicates us in some way and offer no redemption,” a tendency that Eaglestone finds in what he calls a “recent wave of ‘perpetrator fiction’” (34).The rest of the second chapter offers among the most important tests and interpretations of Arendt’s notion of banality of evil in recent scholarship. It analyzes many works, with Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones as its chief instance. If we are to pursue Arendt’s banality of evil in a literary context, we need to find an interesting way to talk about lousy literary material because there is a homology between Arendt’s ethical notion of “nobodies” and what we consider bad literature. They both suggest shallow, simple, and evasive characters; perpetrators who refuse to see the effects of their actions and acknowledge another’s point of view; works that show “why the question of ‘why’ does not have an answer” (65). This chapter deals with a form of public secret in so far as each banal act can be public but all of them taken together form a bigger picture which must be denied and held secret even from, and by, the perpetrator himself.The third chapter begins with a distinction between “working through” and “stasis,” with Eaglestone saying that writers like Kertész and W. G. Sebald refuse to working through the trauma of the Holocaust (72). As an example of this, Kertész’s narrator pronounces that he wants to be Jewish only in the exclusionary or othered sense, “in Auschwitz as a branded Jew” (77) or a Jew for whom God is Auschwitz (78). Eaglestone explains that “stasis” is a way to refuse any watering down of the horror of Holocaust, and is a way to not “skirt . . . violence, murder, and torture” that primary witnesses have seen (92). “Stasis” in this sense is the opposite of the denial that some see even in trying to work through or otherwise come to terms with the horrifying event.The “stasis” chapter introduces the second half of The Broken Voice and inaugurates the fourth and fifth chapters’ attempts to bring together trauma theory and postcolonial studies under the new term “disorientalism.” The neologism derives from “disorientation,” which is the way Eaglestone understands Blanchot’s notion of the “disaster,” which he divides into “des,” which implies a removal or aversion, and “starre” or a planet, and translates as “to lose one’s guidance, to lose one’s star or direction” (95). This effort resonates historically because genocide has often been connected to colonialism, as captured in Hitler’s short formulation that “Our Mississippi must be the Volga and not the Niger” (99). Eaglestone alleges a common form of disorientation that follows in the aftermath of both. The fourth chapter, then, offers a notable addition to Heart of Darkness studies and genocide studies by analyzing Joseph Conard’s novel as representing a model attempt at extermination. The term Eaglestone wants us to apply to complement post-Holocaust and postcolonial literature, in cases of similar disorientation, is “postgenocide” literature. The fifth chapter follows with Eaglstone noting limitations of “disorientalism” and discusses the Holocaust centric universe of trauma theory, which may become a tool of inadvertent colonialism (128).The sixth chapter addresses post-Holocaust kitsch, which is the last form of denial treated in this book. It covers not only obvious simplifications and stereotyping (138) but popular representational forms and artworks deemed successful like Hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a young adult novel by John Boyne. Eaglestone takes his inspiration and cites from Sianne Ngai (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2012) and her argument that kitsch gives “insights into ‘major problems in aesthetic theory,’ (Ngai 2), politics, and the contemporary” (140) as well as Saul Friedlander’s Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993). The usual kitsch analytic tropes—obscuring horror, eschewing reflection, instant gratification—are applied to an analysis of British collective memory of the Second World War. Targeted are the simplistic divisions—us/them, good/evil—as well as the general watering down and Hollywoodization of the past, all of which are, again, forms of denial of the Holocaust.In sum, The Broken Voice is a compelling scholarly work that accomplishes many things at the same time. It shows what the new generation of trauma studies work can be: first, a consolidation of ideas about traumatic temporality, witnessing, and claiming unclaimed or unclaimable experiences; a demonstration of how trauma studies can contribute to the development of broader philosophical ideas—not only Arendt’s banality of evil but also Levinas’ “Autrui,” Heidegger’s “falling,” and so on; and how “trauma” and “genocide” as analytic tools can help understand some of the notable contemporary literary works. It is also a significant interdisciplinary model for a way we can bring together the balkanized dimensions of literary studies: trauma theory and postcolonial studies, as well as critical theory, narrative studies, and historiography.This reader must, however, also offer some criticism. Eaglestone’s discussion of “working through” in the third chapter seems to have missed the main point about that concept, namely that working through is a way to deal with compulsive part of the repetition of the past. Working through does not exclude fixation on the past or stasis, but rather includes those among its many forms of engagement with traumatic material. In this interpretation, “stasis” is a way to acknowledge how difficult it is to move on because the horror of the past has become an integral part of one’s personal and collective identity. Stasis would then be a key realization that in certain contexts we are dominated by an alien force, that “what happens, happens anyway” (75). We can narcissistically enjoy the past, be fixated, not want to let it go, and even use it as a pretext to become like the “perpetrators,” or believe that we are fated. The examples are all, however, acting out of trauma and, as such, the first steps in externalizing it, representing it, and working through it.The fifth chapter that is on trauma theory refers to another notion that is somewhat misleading: the “Holocaust model” (128). If trauma theory started with the experience of the Holocaust, by the end of the 1990s, it had branched out to other experiences like slavery, in, for example, numerous readings of Tony Morrison’s Beloved, and colonialism—here let me mention only Tim Dean’s essay “The Germs of Empires: Heart of Darkness, Colonial Trauma, and the Historiography of AIDS” (New York: Columbia University Press 1998) for its notable absence from Eaglestone’s bibliography. We can, perhaps, doubt the model of trauma based on compulsion repetition can work cross-culturally. But even that reproach would be limited since compulsion repetition is the very basic psychic mechanism shared not just by humans but also by some animal species.As Eaglestone notes, ways of coming to terms with the compulsion, because they involve social practices, remain culturally specific. Eaglestone also rightly notes the importance of audience, with most of the works in question being oriented toward the West. In this sense, the Holocaust-centric model of trauma is the effect of authors resorting to familiar disasters to represent less familiar ones to Western readers. I am, however, skeptical about the relevance of this critique of the “Holocaust model” as I do not see any evidence that it is still hindering trauma or genocide studies. Most cases of imposition of Western norms in connection to mass killings are just that examples of a general attitude that should be dealt with as an outlook problem, and have little to do with the study of the Holocaust as such. There also remains an important issue of the culturally specific ways that genocide is imagined and represented in different societies—a question to which more attention should be devoted. In the fifth chapter Eaglestone briefly refers to Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, and Dave Egger’s What Is the What to suggest that these novels do not represent atrocities as incomprehensible, which we can see as calling for a further study, preferably, by scholars with first-hand knowledge of the local cultures.In his ambition, Eaglestone is trying to do too much. Striving for coherence, at times, strains his analysis and we are left to wonder what the connections are between, say, kitsch and representation of the genocide in Rwanda. But the issues pale when compared to what The Broken Voice achieves—in the first two chapters; in numerous fine readings of literature, philosophy, and art; and in defining many issues and connections between them that are setting up new scholarly landmarks.