Illies

Writing in a hectic, almost impromptu present tense while darting to and fro between dozens of parallel stories, Florian Illies has pieced together the emotional history of a doomed generation. His cast of European artists and intellectuals spend the 1920s experimenting erotically, then succumb to anxiety and outright panic during the 1930s; by the 1940s, they are either in exile or on their way to concentration camps.The structure of Illies’s book, apparently haphazard in its quick cuts between people and places, matches…