Diary Of The Fall

Michel Laub takes us through the defining moments in the lives of three generations of men from the same family in his short new novel Diary Of The Fall.

The narrator can’t get past the guilt he feels for a schoolboy prank gone wrong and is blaming all of his problems as an adult on this one event from his childhood, while he explains more about what he knows of his father’s and grandfather’s lives.

His grandfather escaped Auschwitz and headed to Brazil to start a new life, where the rest of the story is set. After his death, the family discovered an encyclopaedia-style diary of his life after the concentration camp, giving some clues to the secrets he never told anyone.

When the narrator’s father develops Alzheimer’s, he begins writing his own obsessive diaries and, in turn, his son diarises everything he finds out through reading his family’s notebooks.

What starts off looking like a series of unrelated, numbered points turns out to be a family’s life story, taking in cultural identity, the childhood traumas of each character, and how a relative’s history echoes down the generations. A powerful novel.