Have you ever seen a flip book? Most people have. If you haven’t, Wikipedia will catch you up. Reading Kirsty Manning’s speedy novel, The Hidden Book, felt like reading a flip book. The chapters—and the characters, plot, etc.—race by and create more of an impression than a fully-fledged story. This is particularly disappointing because Manning used someone’s story to create this novel. The photo album at the heart of this book was created by Spanish photographers, Antonio García Alonso and Francesc Boix Campo, who were imprisoned at Mauthausen, and brought to Australia by Bodgan Ivanovic, another political prisoner. I have a lot of questions about Manning’s decisions.
The Hidden Book is told in two parts. One part follows Hannah Campbell, the granddaughter of Nico Antonov, a Yugoslavian man who was incarcerated at Mauthausen. The other part shows us Lena Lang, a young Austrian woman who lives near Mauthausen. The novel shifts its perspectives back and forth from the 1990s and 2000s in Australia to 1944 and 1945 in Austria. Tonally, this book is all over the place. While Hannah jumps from relationship to relationship while trying to figure out how to get her grandfather’s photo album from her mother, Roza, Lena dodges the coercive advances of a camp commandant and helps Nico hide an album full of evidence of Nazi atrocities. It’s hard to care about Hannah’s long coming-of-age when, at any moment, Lena and Nico could be caught and executed.
My other issue with The Hidden Book is that it never slows down long enough for good character development for Nico, Lena, and the other characters in Austria. The only reason I don’t say the same about Hannah’s half of the narrative is because so many of the chapters show important moments in Hannah’s life; this has more of a quantitative effect rather than a qualitative one. I was really frustrated with both the pace of this novel and the choices of who got to be a protagonist. This book could have amazing if, say, the main character or narrator was Nico Antonov.
The only reason I didn’t give this book a single star instead of two is because I was fascinated by the kernel of real history in the fiction. I knew prisoners hid evidence of their existence and of Nazi crimes against Jews, Russians, political prisoners, LGBTQ+ people, religious dissenters, Roma/Sinti people, and many more. This evidence—including the Mauthausen photo album—was used at the Nuremberg and other tribunals to convict Nazis of their appalling crimes against humanity. Manning’s book gives me a window into these heroic acts of preservation.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.