In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen

Cloth; Used. As New. Dust Jacket: As New. In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen. First Edition/First Printing. Fiction/Literature. "Matthiessen, a Zen Buddhist, participated in three contemplative retreats at Auschwitz, and In Paradise is a fictional account of a week-long retreat to a former German Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland. Dr D Clements Olin at first seems to have no personal reason for joining the retreat. He is a prominent poet and academic from Massachusetts, a single man in late middle age, a scholar of the Shoah who specialises in Slavic poets (the novel's epigraph is a poem by Anna Akhmatova). He has a particular fondness for the writings of Tadeusz Borowski, who was imprisoned in and wrote about Auschwitz. His companions on retreat are a mixed bunch, including nuns and priests, a female academic from Israel, a Zen master who is an "ex-hippie ex-Orthodox Jew", several Poles and Germans, and a brutish loudmouth named Earwig. Olin keeps to himself, and his connection