The Revisionist — Helen Schulman

A black comedy about the difficulties and absurdities of confronting the past.

Dr. David Hershleder, a brilliant but tortured neurologist, has been thrown out of the house by his wife. Stumbling numbly through life, he no longer knows how to share his heart. In order to avoid the paralyzing sense of loss, he embarks on a research project involving a Holocaust denier. The son of a refugee, Hershleder has a growing fascination with Holocaust denial. With the help of two buddies from college, he finds and confronts a revisionist in Paris, and in the process confronts himself, exploding the lies around which he has constructed his own life-his own revisionist history.

With humor and incisive intelligence, Helen Schulman explores the frightening world of Holocaust denial as well as the more intimate denial that we often use to survive our own lives.