Kukathas is a freelance writer. In this essay, Kukathas considers the narrative strategies Keneally uses in his novel.

When Schindler's List (under the title Schindler's Ark) won the Booker Prize in 1982, more than one critic objected to the fact that this work of nonfiction could win a major literary prize that had traditionally been awarded to the year's best book of fiction. Other critics complained that not only was the work not fiction, it was not good literature, mainly because of its documentary style. Schindler's List is an unusual novel, to be sure, because it moves back and forth between telling a story and reporting the facts of history—and people's very personal accounts of that history. It perhaps does not read like a literary novel because, in some sense, things are told too plainly. There are dozens of characters in the novel, but with the...