Far less dramatic—not even in the same league, but disturbing in its own way—is the record of psychoanalysis during the Third Reich (psychoanalysts were not involved in the two programs mentioned above). Psychoanalysis, pejoratively referred to as “the Jewish science” by the Nazis, was of course created by Sigmund Freud in Vienna. One of the early and seminal centers of treatment, research, and training was the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, founded in 1923 (it grew out of the Psychoanalytic Polyclinic, a free clinic founded three years before) by Max Eitingon, who was the director. Many of the faculty, including Eitingon, were Jews; several were also socialists.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Institute’s days were clearly numbered; not only because psychoanalysis was considered “Jewish” and so many psychoanalysts were Jewish, but also because its goals of individual growth, self-knowledge, and independence were directly antithetical to the mindset that a totalitarian government wanted to impose. Freud was now anathema, a new language of “Aryan” terms for analytic principles was devised, all Jews were purged, and the focus of psychoanalysis in Berlin shifted to the furthering of Nazi ideology: treating “war trauma” in soldiers and SS men, prioritization of and obedience to a totalitarian mindset, “reorienting” dissidents towards approved National Socialist thinking, conversion therapy as a treatment for homosexuality, and the like. The talking cure was to be weaponized for state purposes.

Seven months after Hitler seized power, Freud wrote to a colleague in England, “Berlin is lost…” Eitingon was forced to resign and fled Germany and was replaced by two Aryan analysts as co-directors. Three years later the Institute was subsumed into the German Institute for Research and Psychotherapy, known as “the Gӧring Institute,” with a new director, Matthias Gӧring, cousin of Reichsmarshall Hermann Gӧring.

The Institute’s excuse for collaborating with the regime was that it was the only way to “save” psychoanalysis and permit its survival; Freud himself had early on counseled accommodation as necessary to accomplish this end. What the Institute learned was that there is no accommodation short of full cooperation in a totalitarian state. But what was the toll of compromise on the men and women left in the Institute?

This was the history of psychoanalysis under the Nazis, which has been reviewed in a number of scholarly works¹. The novelist Stephen O’Connor has set himself a different task: to examine the life of a fictional non-Jewish German psychoanalyst as it played out against the background of Berlin and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute before and after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. His new novel, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, follows its main character, Günter Zeitz, from his initial meeting with Sigmund Freud in 1924 through the years of the Third Reich and beyond. Günter will be our avatar, our surrogate participant through whose eyes we will watch things play out, during the heyday of psychoanalysis and through its suppression. However, the novel is not primarily about the destruction of German psychoanalysis, but about Gunter during the destruction of German psychoanalysis. Günter will be Exhibit 1 in the case for the acute and lingering effects of trauma.

As the novel opens we meet Günter corralling Freud on a street corner in Vienna and asking him to take him on for analytic training, which will consist largely of Günter’s personal analysis, and Freud agrees. In the doctor’s waiting room Günter meets another patient, Josine Rosen, a Jewish woman, and shortly thereafter they begin an affair. It becomes clear that Josine is troubled; she has already had a suicide attempt, and is subject to bouts of depression, but Günter is in love and within a year they marry and soon thereafter have a daughter, Hannah. Despite their ongoing disputes about some aspects of Freud’s “death force” theory, Freud recommends Günter for a position at the prestigious Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, which he accepts. Over time, the course of true love does not exactly run smooth; Josine is unstable, and the National Socialists are increasing in power and presence in Germany, posing a problem for her as a Jew. Günter and Josine will separate and reunite several times and draw others into their story as their world descends into a very rigidly structured type of chaos. How they all navigate this personal and professional turmoil determines the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, we listen in as the analysts at the Institute discuss the increasingly dangerous situation, and how to respond. They initially dismiss Hitler and his “gang of toothless throwbacks” (p. 127) as upstarts with no political base and no future (as does much of the German public) until 1933, when it becomes apparent that this is no longer the case. In 1936, after Matthias Gӧring assumes the directorship, new rules for psychoanalysis are introduced; complying with these changes is clearly the only way the Institute will be allowed to continue to function. Some analysts flee, some accommodate, and some join the resistance.

However, the novel is really Günter’s story. Günter is eminently likeable; he is a bright, engaged and engaging character pursuing his academic dream who genuinely wants to mitigate human suffering. We watch him grow from the sheltered son of a country doctor to a confident teacher and practitioner, and we watch him fall in love, repeatedly, almost as though he is “feeling his way” in this world of emotions. When the Institute is taken over and its direction changed Günter finds himself in a moral quandary: he is horrified by National Socialism but feels unable to do anything about it. Can there be a small degree of accommodation, to allow him to continue to help those who need help, or is accommodation a slippery slope which ends in a betrayal of self and principles? Silence or resistance? We watch with him as he tries to keep his professional life intact as his personal life begins to unravel. When he is forced to treat Dr. Gӧring’s nephew, an SS lieutenant recently returned from a murderous detail in the East, he reaches his personal Rubicon.

Günter is an everyman caught in the gears of a machine, and the kernel, the gist, of the novel, is a question: how does one go on living one’s life in a system gone mad, and what are our responsibilities to others and ourselves? How do you go to work and go home to your family, how do you love and hate and gossip and drink your coffee and read your newspaper and pick up your paycheck and go to a movie, when you are convinced that a great evil is being perpetrated, that you are told to be part of it, and that any false step on your part might bring that evil down upon you? When it is your country and your countrymen and your colleagues doing it? What is the personal cost, the cost to yourself, and to your self, when—if— you come out on the other side of the madness?

The other characters, and their interplay, are handled carefully and realistically. Josine is a large and critical part of the story. She is clearly—and sadly—damaged, and her behavior is too erratic for us to “like” her, although she engenders tremendous sympathy . She is a tragic figure and we feel for her, although this is not always easy. The student analyst Elke Weber, who becomes a critical participant in the story, is drawn realistically and sympathetically. Hannah will become important as a character in her own right later in the book. The other characters in the novel, including some of the historical figures, are drawn simply but cleanly and expressively; the reader feels that they know them, if only briefly.

We Want So Much to Be Ourselves is well-written, engaging, and suspenseful. O’Connor’s narrative successfully summons up both the atmosphere in the world of psychoanalysis in the 1920’s and Nazi-era Berlin’s anxiety and paranoia in the 1930’s. The reader who has some familiarity with the history of Weimar and Nazi-era Germany will note a rare factual slip², but nothing that is critical for plot development or that takes away from the pleasure of the reading experience; such are the pitfalls of writing historical fiction. When we reach the last hundred pages or so—the postwar years—the narrative tempo speeds up, and near the very end the novel becomes telescoped into a series of rapid-fire moments in the protagonists’ lives, seeming more an epilogue than a continuous part of the novel; this is the section that catalogues the aftermath. Life hobbles on, though one might wish for a more leisurely unwinding of the tale.

We Want So Much to Be Ourselves asks how a person of moral integrity can function in what the German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers has called a Verbrecherstaat, a “criminal state”—not simply a state that occasionally commits crimes, but a state which has been transmuted entirely into a criminal enterprise—and what the price of that functioning, of complicity or resistance, might be. It portrays profoundly human characters who live through societal trauma, from which it is possible to emerge, but rarely to emerge unscathed, and emphasizes the role of connection for moving forward and healing. Importantly, it reminds us that patient care does not exist in a vacuum or a pure state, divorced from the society that surrounds it, and that when it is co-opted and weaponized by political considerations, things go very bad, very fast.

We Want So Much to Be Ourselves
Stephen O’Connor
Bellevue Literary Press, New York 2026: 496 pages
_______________________________________________________
¹The history is complicated…and contested; see Geoffrey Cocks’ “The devil and the details: psychoanalysis in the Third Reich,” in Psychoanalytic Review, 88 (2), 2001; Zvi Lothane, “The deal with the devil to “save” psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany” Psychoanalytic Review, 88(2), 2001; and Cocks’ review (in Psychoanalysis and History 3(2), 2001) of James and Eileen Goggin’s Death of a Jewish Science—Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich, among others. The Goggins feel that psychoanalysis was “destroyed” under the Nazis, while Cocks notes significant continuities in the discipline through this period, although his analysis includes psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

²At one point one of the characters is said to have been arrested by the police and “…got off the train at Theresienstadt and went straight to the gas chamber…” (p. 425) While the person narrating this event is admittedly unsure that the prisoner went to the gas chamber, the fact is that they could not have; there were no gas chambers at Theresienstadt. In another example, a patient of the Berlin clinic is referred to as a “Leninist” who was a member of “the DKP.” The author is presumably referring here to the German Communist Party, known as the DKP, or Deutsche Kommunistiche Partei. However, the DKP was only founded in 1986. The Communist party in Germany during the Weimar Republic and (though it was rapidly outlawed) in the Third Reich was the KPD (Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands).

Web image by Medhum.org based on the original book cover.

Henry’s severe illness and his difficulties accessing treatment prompted Green to contemplate the horrifying statistics of tuberculosis and the paradox of our extensive knowledge about it. More than one million people still die every year from this ancient disease; yet the bacterial cause was elucidated a century and a half ago, and effective treatments have been around since the 1950s. Barring eradication, the germs mutate and become resistant. Given dire living conditions, it spreads. Effective therapy can be prohibitively expensive. “The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not” (p. 5). People die where cures cannot be obtained. 

History is woven though Henry’s story, but so are politics, culture, and economics: the discoveries, the 19^th-century romanticization of ‘wasting away,’ the hard realities of pharmaceutical development and delivery. Henry has survived, become healthy and an inveterate TikToker and youtuber. He even has an episode on the power of storytelling. But other people that we encounter through this tale have died. 

We still have tuberculosis because statistics de-personify it, and geography allows ignoring it. Green uses Henry’s story to invite us to ‘[t]hink about how rare and precious humans are, and how many of them you get to worry for and care about. Then if you can, find a way to multiply that 1,250,000 times’ (p. 189).  

The book flows easily in language that is clear and accessible, a tribute to Green’s experience in writing young-adult fiction. In the end, without denying the benefits of medical interventions, he calls for a focus on the real cause of tuberculosis: injustice—tolerated and unchallenged. ‘Ultimately,’ he writes, ‘we are the cause’ (p. 184).  

Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
New York: Penguin/Crash Course Books
2025
ISBN 9780525556572 

Web image created by Medhum.org

In the throes of the early AIDS crisis, people began stitching panels to remember their loved ones. The panels were joined in quilts, and the quilts were joined with each other until they became bigger than a tennis court, bigger than a football field. So unwieldy it became, the giant quilt had to be broken into pieces in order to be manipulated. Chunks would tour on display. It now has a virtual existence too and is curated by the National AIDS Memorial.

In 1989, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman made Common Threads, a 79-minute documentary, narrated by Dustin Hoffman. Based on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, their film traced the stories of five people who had died through the words of their grief-stricken friends and family. The survivors describe the solace that they had derived from quilting memorial panels for their loved ones. They also refer to milestones in the disease history: the president who would not utter the word; the movie star who acknowledged his own disease only after 15,000 had already died. The five divergent tales serve to emphasize the awesome scope of the tragedy: each panel and each name must recall an equally unique and cherished life cut short. In their final scene, the AIDS quilt lies on the Mall in Washington as names of hundreds of loved ones are read by grieving families and friends.

As the drone-less but steady camera slowly pulls back high above the patches of color in the evening light, I was reminded of the famous, expanding scene midway through, Gone with the Wind, as Scarlet O’Hara picks her way through the waste of Civil War wounded and dead. Common Threads is equally political, and it too is a love story. It won the 1989 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. I cannot help but imagine that the quilt and the film helped to generate the protections against discrimination of people living with HIV/AIDS provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law in 1990.

Stitchery, knitting, embroidery, macramé and crochet have long been significant components of occupational and art therapy for mental and physical health (Leone 2021; Youngson 2019). But they have been marshalled into numerous anti-war, anti-discrimination, pro-environment causes with remarkable aplomb, talent, and humor. Remember the pink Pussyhats from the Women’s March in 2017? Patterns for them still abound on the web. The possibly antediluvian origins of crafting protest are featured in history and fiction: recall Charles Dickens’s knitters at the foot of the guillotine (Tale of Two Cities, 1859); or Margaret Atwood’s Zillah who makes art from dryer fluff, calling it “naive surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon” (Cat’s Eye, 1988); or even Peggy Erhart’s more frivolous parking-meter protest in small-town America (A Dark and Stormy Knit, 2024).

Self-described “craft nerd,” Betsy Greer coined the word “craftivism” in 2003. She wrote Knitting for Good (Roost Books, 2008) and edited an anthology that goes well beyond knitting to other techniques and contexts (Craftivism, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014). Scholars have noticed (e.g., Moreshead and Salter, 2023; Vachhani et al, 2025). The diffuse movement has even found critics who challenge its “white, feminist appropriation of graffiti,” and seek to empower it to “evolve and become a more intersectional” practice (Close, 2018).

References 
Close, Samantha. Knitting activism, knitting gender, knitting race. International Journal of Communication 12 (2018): 23-23. 
Leone, Lauren. Craft in Art Therapy. Routledge, New York and London, 2021 
Moreshead, Abigail, and Anastasia Salter. Knitting the in-visible: data-driven craftivism as feminist resistance. Journal of Gender Studies 32.8 (2023), 875–886.
Vachhani, Sheena J., Emma Bell, and Alexandra Bristow. The Affective Micropolitics of Craftivism: Organizing social change through the minor gesture. Organization Studies 46.4 (2025): 525-547. 
Youngson, Bel. Craftivism for occupational therapists: finding our political voice. British Journal of Occupational Therapy 82.6 (2019): 383-385. 

Web image by Medhum.org

The Iranian-American author, Azar Nafisi (b. 1955), reminisces about her experiences teaching English literature in Iran before, during and after the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). The book opens near the end of her sojourn in Tehran. A small group of young women, who have been friends since they were University students, gather in the author’s home to read and discuss English novels. They wear western clothes, remove their veils, and eat sweets. Some have been in prison. They conceal their simple purpose from fathers, husbands, brothers, because meeting to read Western fiction would be construed as an act of defiance.  

In four sections, two named for twentieth-century novels and two for nineteenth-century authors — “Lolita” “Gatsby” “James” and “Austen,” Nafisi constructs a series of flashbacks that describe the events of late 1970s to the 1990s in the inner and outer world of an academic woman. The books and writers used in the section headings have walk-on parts or starring roles that jar in this ostensibly alien context. Yet, they work surprisingly well for the women students, stimulating them to think in new ways about the situation in which they find themselves. Conversely, as the students assimilate the English and American writers into their world, we learn more about their Iran. 

Myriad details of moment, garb, color, and food, evoke the everyday “feel” of protests and atrocities that are known in the West only through journalist’s reports. The long descriptions contrast sharply with a relentless and probably deliberate lack of precision about several basic things. For example, the author withholds her age and the identity and the nature of her relationship with “my magician,” a greatly admired man –perhaps a lover or a teacher–who seems to exist on chocolate and philosophy.  

Possessives and the first-person singular are used liberally (“my students”) to remind us that this is one woman’s story—notwithstanding the solace, but barely developed presence, of a husband, two children, and a mother. The decision may have been made to protect personal privacy. But the result also conspires to build a narcissistic tone, as if the author marvels at her own creativity, attractiveness, resilience, survival, and escape.  

Some of the most engaging passages describe the male students’ difficulty with literature that they perceive to be immoral (for its sexual content or for the agency it assigns women). In the social climate, the young men are utterly unable to accept great writing on its own terms. One wonders how they would react to Nafisi’s own book and her portrayal of them. The wonderful device of a mock trial of Gatsby (pp. 120-136) challenges the students by going to the heart of the conflict of politics, religion, literature, and justice; it would work well as an excerpt and is worthy of emulation in our classrooms. The work deepens our understanding and complicates the impressions of Iran that are generated by a steady diet of news reports. 

In 2024, Reading Lolita in Tehran became a film directed by Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis. 

Born into a privileged, Iranian family and educated in both England and the United States, Nafisi saw the great changes in her beloved country as the encroachment of a retrograde, unthinking tyranny, hostile to women and to reason. She moved to the United States in 1997 and became a citizen in 2008. She has served as a professor of English literature in several universities, holds at least nine honorary doctorates and numerous awards and prizes for her creative work. 

Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi
Random House, New York 2003
347 pages

From the Vault:
In these times, certain works of literature seem to be as relevant to us now as when they were published — possibly more relevant than the times that they depict. From the vault of the now closed Literature, Arts and Medicine Database, we will pluck a few items for their power and timeliness.

Web photo by  ariyan Dv 

He was wrong.  

In Nazi Germany, sleep was a poor protection from the horrors of the external world, as Charlotte Beradt, a Berlin journalist, found out. Beradt, a Jew and a Communist—and thus an ultimate outsider in Hitler’s state—began having unsettling dreams shortly after the Nazi takeover of the government in 1933, dreams of being “chased, tortured, shot at, [and] scalped,” from which she awakened drenched in sweat. Wondering if others might be having similar experiences, she began collecting dream reports from neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, aided in some cases by a friendly physician who would ask his patients about their dreams in the context of their office visits. She recorded them in her notebook or on scraps of paper, often in coded language so they would be unrecognizable to prying eyes, especially of the police. This project engaged her from 1933 until she left Germany in 1939, ultimately winding up in New York City and settling among a community of German expatriates and refugees, including Hannah Arendt. She originally published her dream reports in 1966; this new English translation by Damion Searls appeared in 2025. 

The book is divided into eleven chapters, each reporting several dreams that are linked by a common thread. Patterns emerge and are echoed: initially, the loss of privacy and the intrusion of state policies into everyday life. There are dreams in which the dreamer is under surveillance or feel they must conform to state policies; Goebbels and Hitler appear in several of these, or exist in the background. There are Kafkaesque nightmares where household items like stoves and pillows become monitors of activity or nagging and accusatory voices (Beradt refers to the “Orwellian” sense of being watched, noting that the dream content prefigures Orwell’s 1984 by many years).  

Interestingly, after 1935 (and the passage of the notorious Nuremberg Race Laws) dreams show up in the text characterized by a preoccupation with the wish for the ideal Aryan body type (blonde, blue-eyed, tall), or, more commonly, the preoccupation with the dreamer’s falling short of this ideal and being singled out for it. Non-Jewish Germans have dreams in which their noses are too prominent and “the authorities” accuse them, directly or indirectly, of having Jewish ancestry. And in her final chapter, “Jewish Dreamers, or, ‘I’ll Make Way for the Trash, if Needed,’ ” Beradt catalogues the dreams of Jewish Germans, dreams of exile, loss, hounding and pursuit, and self-abnegation. 

The book is a relatively brief (122 pages) compendium of nightmares, some of which have the feel of surrealistic short film clips, which catalogues the increasing encroachment of a totalitarian state on the lives—and into the unconscious worlds—of its subjects. The author’s analyses of dreams bespeak her familiarity with dreamwork concepts (she is referred to in several biographical sketches—not part of the book—as a “member of the Berlin psychoanalytic community,” although she was not a trained psychoanalyst), and many of her interpretations are sophisticated and suggest significant familiarity with Freudian concepts.  

It is worth noting that Beradt has probably surveyed a skewed population; her subjects are mostly people she knows, or referred by people she knows and presumably trusts, and there is a selection bias, in that she has probably not approached, say, Nazi Party members or sympathizers for their dreams. A large number of the dreams seem to date from the early years of the Third Reich, 1933-1935/6; it is possible that in the later years it was just too terrifying to talk about one’s nighttime visions…or that the dreamers had started to leave the country. 

The Third Reich of Dreams makes absorbing and chilling reading. It is fascinating to see how dreams, the realm of the personal unconscious, become infiltrated by and reflective of societal change in real time. Sometimes “the royal road to the unconscious” leads straight to the dreamer’s front door.  

The Third Reich of Dreams  
by Charlotte Beradt, translated by Damion Searls 
c. 1966, 2025 
Princeton University Press 
122 pp. 

Web photo by Ed Wingate 

The action in James, which is told in the first person, follows a good part of Twain’s story line. James, a slave, overhears that he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his wife and family, so he flees his owner’s home and hides on a small island in the Mississippi River to buy time and plan. Meanwhile, Huck’s father, a violent alcoholic, has returned to town, and to get away from him, Huck has faked his own death, has run away from home, and is also sheltering on the same island. Together Huck and James flee down the Mississippi on a raft. With Huck thought to be dead and the runaway James presumed to be his killer, James realizes that Huck’s safety and survival are the only proofs of his innocence.   

Many of the episodes of Twain’s novel are here, but when James and Huck become separated, James’s independent narrative begins. He is left in the service of a blacksmith, where his singing attracts the attention of a leader of a minstrel troupe, who purchases him. But to perform, James must first be made up as a white man and then wear blackface. The troupe also contains a light-skinned black man passing as white, who befriends James and runs away with him. They wind up on a crowded riverboat and James discovers that Huck is on the same boat. The ship’s boiler explodes, the ship capsizes, and James must decide to save either his friend or Huck. He saves Huck (there are multiple reasons for this) and then sets about trying to return home to find his family and get them to safety…and freedom. 

James is often funny, but it is not light. Separation of families, whippings, and killings are presented as the backdrop to daily life—which renders them even more horrible. However, Everett is not just interested in retelling the Huck Finn story from another character’s viewpoint; he is interested in telling a different story: James’s. Turning the racial dynamic upside down, Everett’s slaves speak perfect English among themselves, but purposely revert to deep stereotypical dialect when around white people. They understand that by code-switching in this way they are giving the whites what they want and expect; to do otherwise would challenge the rigid social hierarchy and thus put the slaves in grave danger. Their use of dialect keeps them relatively safe, and importantly, helps them maintain a kind of control of the situation. When you have so little, a secret is a powerful thing. 

For much of the book is about power. There is a wonderful scene early in the novel where James is holding a class for slave children in which he drills them on the way they must speak around whites: 

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say when they don’t feel ‘superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.” 

The children then proceed to enumerate the rules: don’t make eye contact, never speak first, never address any subject directly when talking to another slave. The correct way to report a fire in the kitchen is not “Fire, fire!”, but “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”—because “…we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.” In this and other sections Everett lets us peek behind a curtain to see Black resistance in action. He also makes us see beyond Twain’s literary stereotype to understand the enslaved Black characters as fully formed people: aware, articulate, clever, and possessed of deep emotional lives, creators of a complex society within the general society of the time and place. Everett isn’t interested in the myth of the long-suffering, infinitely patient, preternaturally wise servant, except to explode it.  

James suggests that it is the control of the tools of the intellect—primarily spoken language (though James can read and write as well)—that is ultimately the slaves’ power and their defense. Denying the enslaved an education was, of course, a way of keeping them down, and many in the South fought hard to maintain this status quo. James’s treasured possessions are a book, a notebook, and a pencil, and the code-switching mentioned above is not merely a defense, but a way in which white masters can be manipulated.  

Besides education, Everett explores another source of power (or its lack): skin color, its implications and, despite the rigid social system, its malleability. Beyond the primary black/white power implications of the antebellum South, we have in the minstrel performance section white men in blackface, a black man “passing” as white who dons blackface, and a black man who must be made up to look white before he can put on blackface. There is even a biracial character in the novel, who shows up so unexpectedly that the reader is left to wonder about the author’s motivation here; is he saying this is far more common than anyone thought? Is he sending up the Great American Novel? Saying that the black and white roots of American history—and literature— are more inextricably commingled than we could imagine? Everett doesn’t expound on this but leaves us to hypothesize. 

 Perhaps the most obvious signifier of power in the novel is in the title. The protagonist is not James, the name the white world—his enslaver—calls him. but James, the name he chooses for himself. At one point he is told to identify himself:  

He is not someone’s property, no longer to be identified by a name someone else has given him. He has chosen this name, and the ability to name (see the children’s discussion above) is a power in itself. 

James is brilliant, clever, eminently readable, a tale of personal victory and an emotionally rich yet biting commentary on the dynamics of race relations. It is also grimly serious in its portrayal of the horrors of daily life for enslaved people in the antebellum South. Everett starts with Twain’s work and takes it in another direction, with another voice heard from. James’s intelligence, humanity, and determination run through the entire novel; in Everett’s telling, James is not simply Huck’s long-suffering sidekick, the good loyal companion who is ultimately liberated—literally—by Huck and Tom Sawyer. James has his own agenda, and though he may be bought and sold, he is at no time a pawn. He is hyperaware of his situation and always searching for a way to accomplish his ends; he has agency. Near the novel’s end we even have a Biblical moment where James brings down a cataclysm upon his enslavers and leads his people to freedom.  

A retelling of Huckleberry Finn, indeed. 

James is shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Nonso Anozie reads an excerpt:

James
Percival Everett 
Doubleday, New York
320 pp (hardcover) 

Feature image by Guille Pozzi