This book is set at Auschwitz in 1996, where protagonist Clements Olin is attending a week-long spiritual retreat with a diverse group of people, including a rabbi, nuns, priests, descendants, people of various nationalities, and academics. Olin is an American born in Poland during WWII. During the retreat, Olin comes to terms with a family secret and its personal ramifications. Each participant has his or her own reasons for attending, and these reasons are gradually disclosed.

At the heart of the book is an attempt to understand a horrific tragedy. There is little that resembles a traditional plot. The participants argue. People see things differently and tempers flare. Some are vocal and others reticent. Themes include faith, identity, guilt, remembrance, and the search for truth. Each time a character comments, it provided food for thought. The tone is sad and reflective. The writing is expressive. As I read the book, I almost felt like I was part of the retreat. I think each person reading this book will take something different away from it.
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D. Clements Olin, a professor in the United States, goes on a spiritual retreat to Auschwitz in 1996, ostensibly to research the poet Tadeusz Borowski, but also with a personal quest of his own.

This quiet, introspective novel speaks of the impossibility of making sense of such a terrible tragedy in which, the characters seem to be telling us, all of us are guilty, culpable, or capable of great harm. Yet in the bleakness there is also hope, beauty and love. Each of the characters has his or her own reason for being on this retreat, and readers will struggle with them as they try to make sense of history and their own lives. ( )

IN PARADISE was Peter Matthiessen's last book, and a fitting last chapter for a deeply spiritual man. Set in Auschwitz fifty years after the war, the story follows D. Clements Olin, 55, an American academic and scholar whose field of expertise is the Shoa, i.e. the Holocaust, who is attending an ecumenical pilgrimage at the infamous Polish death camp. The retreat's participants - more than a hundred - are survivors, perpetrators and others, from more than a dozen countries, including nuns, priests, rabbis, Buddhists, monks and more. Olin's own story, and his connections to Poland - and Auschwitz - unfold gradually as he observes the others and becomes especially interested in a young Catholic novice nun. The story is steeped in the elements of guilt, shame, repentance and a search for forgiveness, with the Holocaust and its horrific history at the center. Indeed, the book's title comes from the story of Jesus forgiving the thief crucified next to him, and telling him, This day you shall be with me "in Paradise." Yet Matthiessen also tells us of an alternate version suggesting that Jesus may have actually told the man that " THIS is paradise" - a much darker interpretation of what comes next.

Matthiessen alludes more than once to the work of Holocaust survivors, especially Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski (THIS WAY TO THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN), the latter being the subject of a monograph written by his protagonist Professor Olin. I remember reading Borowski's book decades ago in college but hadn't remembered that, at age 28, he'd committed suicide (head in a gas oven), shortly after the book was published.

IN PARADISE is obviously not a happily-ever-after kind of book. But it is beautifully written and filled with wisdom about the human animal and what he is capable of, both good and evil. Very highly recommended for lovers of serious literary fiction.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

Based on the journal that Peter Matthiessen kept during a spiritual retreat ( Mattheissen was a Zen Buddhist) in Auuschwitz/Birkenau, IN PARADISE tells the story of Clements Olin, who, in 1996, joins a disparate group of people who gather in a spiritual retreat at a former Nazi death camp in Poland.
I realize that this would not be an easy book to write, either as fiction or non-fiction. Although I read it in its entirety, I kept wanting to send it back to the library, unfinished. There were so many cliches, so many stereotypes that, in the end, the book became a detached piece of writing that somehow trivialized the subject matter. ( )

The point of life is to help others through it— who said that? We must help the living while we can, since the dead have no more need of us.

This took me longer to read than I thought it would and when I finished it I was relieved to have finally finished it. I spent the time I was reading it having a like/hate relationship with it. I didn't like the way this was written as at times it was confusing as to what was going on and sometimes I couldn't tell if someone was speaking or if it was just Olin's thoughts. Most of the characters were not all that likeable, especially Olin. I enjoyed when Olin discussed his family as those parts were the most interesting to me. I could have done without the parts between Olin and Sister Catherine and hated what happened with them at the end. This wasn't what I thought it would be and I am too impatient these days to have to wade through this and interpret the symbolism just to enjoy the book. ( )