Montjoy: A Novel in Five Verges follows a Jewish professor and historian grappling with personal and professional crises who is entrusted with a Nazi diary written by a camp guard. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Montjoy unfolded over many years and many iterations. I originally envisioned the story as a classic revenge narrative, but felt it trivialized events, and pointed to the same myths that Walter Benjamin criticized. Benjamin was an enormous inspiration for this book (Montjoy would not exist without the Frankfurt School of philosophers), and the story is very much told from an anti-historicist perspective. Like my protagonist Owen Schoenberg, I had to understand that history cannot be understood as a linear version of events. History is a shadowplay between past and present, and never truly done with us. This is most exemplified by the Ungeist character, who is like a ghost that can’t be chased away. Human history is brutal, unforgiving and ugly, but it is who we are. Once I realized this, there was no way I could go back to my original story. It seemed superfluous by then.

What were some goals you set for yourself as a writer in this book?

I don’t start out with a set of goals necessarily, but I did know that I wanted to experiment with the historical fiction narrative, and create something that felt close to a documentary. Writers like W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Auster and J.G. Ballard (his book Running Wild especially) were huge inspirations to me while writing Montjoy, and I wanted to play with fiction and non-fiction elements almost like a Hegelian dialectic. However, what I arrived at was Theodor Adorno’s notion of the negative dialectic, where contradictions are upheld and no easy resolution is possible. This is what Owen Schoenberg eventually has to grapple with. Behind the more philosophical elements of the story, I wanted to write a story about loss, and how someone who is emotionally closed off deals with that. Owen Schoenberg looks at everything through a non-fiction lens, so it was only natural that he would be consumed by fictions. The merkbuch as well as a version of his son that never existed.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Response: Obviously, the war on truth is concerning for us all and I wanted to show how important it is that we stick to the facts. Wittgenstein said that “the world is the totality of facts, not of things” and I would be hard pressed to see his logic anywhere in the world today. Montjoy explores many subjects (anti-historicism, the Holocaust, the Nazi war machine and its bureaucracy), but most crucial is the embrace of facts, which are not always easy to confirm and can be hijacked by conspiracies. As we are well aware, the truth is now easier to manipulate, skewer and propagandize, and I wanted to show the dangers of such myths and where they can lead. Orwell feared that objective truth was fading out of the world and lies would be our history. Montjoy makes a case for the truth and all its illusions.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

My next book is another historical mystery that shares some of the same themes as Montjoy, but from a completely different angle. I am currently in the writing stage with an eye on a 2026 release.

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