{"id":6361,"date":"2011-06-02T12:20:58","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=6361"},"modified":"2011-06-02T12:20:58","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:20:58","slug":"rosa-a-novel-and-the-death-instinct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=6361","title":{"rendered":"Rosa: A Novel and The Death Instinct"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(Berkeley, CA) Two recent novels that are impossible to avoid comparing are Jonathan Rabb&#8217;s <em>Rosa: A Novel<\/em> and Jeb Rubenfeld&#8217;s <em>The Death Instinct<\/em>. Both are set in the immediate aftermath of World War I in a great city of a combatant power (Berlin and New York, respectively). Both involve mass murder, terrorism, and a political conspiracy. Both include cameo appearances by major historical figures: Freud and Madame Curie in <em>The Death Instinct<\/em>; Einstein and K\u00e4the Kollwitz in <em>Rosa<\/em>. Both involve revolutionary ideas: psychoanalysis and communism. Both foreshadow the horrors that will follow in the 20th century. In both cases, the protagonist is a tough urban detective who gets sucked into politics for the first time as he tries to solve the original crime. A beautiful but troubled waif plays a significant role in each book.<\/p>\n<p>Since the comparison is unavoidable, I must say that Rabb&#8217;s novel is far better. The characters are much more complex, the issues more serious, and the emotional pull much stronger from Rabb&#8217;s flawed protagonist than from Rubenfeld&#8217;s idealized heroes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Berkeley, CA) Two recent novels that are impossible to avoid comparing are Jonathan Rabb&#8217;s Rosa: A Novel and Jeb Rubenfeld&#8217;s The Death Instinct. Both are set in the immediate aftermath of World War I in a great city of a combatant power (Berlin and New York, respectively). Both involve mass murder, terrorism, and a political [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6361"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6364,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6361\/revisions\/6364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}