A Novel about a Good Person

Set in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany sometime in 1946 or 1947, Emma Andiievska’s A Novel about a Good Person is a brilliantly imaginative and boldly surrealistic tale about an “average person’s” struggle to save their soul in the context of the eternal battle between good and evil. On the one hand, the novel deals with the little known and understudied fate of postwar refugees from Eastern Europe, particularly from Ukraine. On the other, through her treatment of time and space, Andiievska creates a timeless model of reality in which all of the events she describes are transformed into symbolic phenomena and her protagonists’ actions, experiences, and moral dilemmas become universal.