Showing posts with label Jonathan Littell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonathan Littell. Show all posts

Saturday, September 9, 2017

Jonathan Littell / The Kindly Ones / Toccata


TOCCATA

by Jonathan Littell

An excerpt



Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you’ll retort, and I don’t want to know. And it certainly is true that this is a bleak story, but an edifying one too, a real morality play, I assure you. You might find it a bit long – a lot of things happened, after all – but perhaps you’re not in too much of a hurry; with a little luck you’ll have some time to spare. And also, this concerns you: you’ll see that this concerns you. Don’t think I am trying to convince you of anything; after all, your opinions are your own business. If after all these years I’ve made up my mind to write, it’s to set the record straight for myself, not for you. For a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And then time passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae – what do we do with such an appalling realization? Suicide, of course, is always an option. But to tell the truth suicide doesn’t tempt me much. Of course I have thought about it over the years; and if I were to resort to it, here’s how I’d go about it: I’d hold a grenade right up against my heart and go out in a bright burst of joy. A little round grenade whose pin I’d delicately pluck out before I released the catch, smiling at the little metallic noise of the spring, the last sound I’d hear, aside from the heartbeat in my ears. And then at last happiness, or in any case peace, as the shreds of my flesh slowly dripped off the walls. Let the cleaning women scrub them off, that’s what they’re paid for, the poor girls. But as I said, suicide doesn’t tempt me. I don’t know why, either – an old philosophical streak perhaps, which keeps me thinking that after all we’re not here to have fun. To do what, then? I have no idea, to endure, probably, to kill time before it finally kills you. And in that case, writing is as good an occupation as anything else, when you have time to spare. Not that I have all that much spare time, I am a busy man; I have what is called a family, a job, hence responsibilities; all that takes time, and it doesn’t leave much to recount one’s memories. Particularly since memories are what I have quite a lot of. I am a veritable memory factory. I will have spent my whole life manufacturing memories, even though these days I’m being paid to manufacture lace. In fact, I could just as easily not write. It’s not as if it’s an obligation. After the war I remained a discreet man; thank God I have never been driven, unlike some of my former colleagues, to write my Memoirs for the purpose of self-justification, since I have nothing to justify, or to earn a living, since I have a decent enough income as it is. Once, I found myself in Germany on a business trip, I was meeting the head of a big lingerie company, to sell him some lace. Some old friends had recommended me to him; so, without having to ask any questions, we both knew where we stood with each other. After our discussion, which went quite well, he got up, took a book down from his shelf and handed it to me. It was the posthumous memoirs of Hans Frank, the Generalgouverneur of Poland; it was called Facing the Gallows. “I got a letter from Frank’s widow,” he said. “She had the manuscript, which he wrote after his trial, published at her own expense; now she’s selling the book to provide for her children. Can you imagine that? The widow of the Generalgouverneur! – I ordered twenty copies from her, to use as gifts. And I advised all my department chiefs to buy one. She wrote me a moving letter of thanks. Did you know him?” I assured him I hadn’t, but that I would read the book with interest. Actually I had run into Hans Frank once, briefly, maybe I’ll tell you about it later on, if I have the courage or the patience. But just then it would have made no sense talking about it. The book in any case was awful – confused, whining, steeped in a curious kind of religious hypocrisy. These notes of mine might be confused and awful too, but I’ll do my best to be clear; I can assure you that they will at least be free of any form of contrition. I do not regret anything: I did my work, that’s all; as for my family problems, which I might also talk about, they concern no one but me; and as for the rest, I probably did go a little far towards the end, but by that point I was no longer entirely myself, I was off-balance, and anyhow the whole world was toppling around me, I wasn’t the only one who lost his head, admit it. Also, I’m not writing to feed my widow and children, I’m quite capable of providing for them. No, if I have finally decided to write, it really is probably just to pass the time, and also, possibly, to clear up one or two obscure points, for you perhaps and for myself. What’s more I think it will do me good. It’s true that I have been in a rather glum mood of late. The constipation, probably. A distressing and painful problem, and a somewhat new one for me; it used to be just the opposite. For a long time I had to go to the toilet three or four times a day; now, once a week would be a blessing. I’ve been reduced to taking enemas, a repulsive procedure, albeit effective. Forgive me for wearying you with such sordid details: but I do have a right to complain a little. And if you can’t bear this you’d better stop right here. I’m no Hans Frank, and I can’t stand mincing words. I want to be precise, as far as I am able. In spite of my shortcomings, and they have been many, I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink, and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.
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Friday, September 8, 2017

Jonathan Littell interview with Samuel Blumenfeld

Jonathan Littell
Poster by T.A.

 Jonathan Littell 
Interview with Samuel Blumenfeld

Interview by Samuel Blumenfeld with Jonathan Littell, author of The Kindly Ones, winner of the Prix Goncourt and the Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française.




Le Monde, November, 17, 2006 (Le Monde des Livres)

This success will take time to understand.

Three months ago, Jonathan Littell didn’t exist. Not in the public eye, at any rate. The dazzling success of his novel The Kindly Ones, which culminated with the Prix Goncourt on November 6, has transformed this unknown person into a public figure. Media curiosity—which to his credit he has not remotely solicited, and has even shunned—has ascribed to Littell several lives and several identities. The most outrageous rumors have done the rounds: that his Gallimard editor, Richard Millet, wrote The Kindly Ones, or else perhaps his father, the novelist Robert Littell…. From Barcelona, where he lives, Littell decided to talk to Le Monde des Livres about his novel.

Jonathan Littell

Q: Looking back, what kind of reception did you anticipate for The Kindly Ones?

 It happened stage by stage. I was already thrilled when my agent, Andrew Nurnberg, told me that he liked the novel and thought he might be able to sell it. Even more so when it was taken on by Gallimard; my entire literary education stems from their backlist. Over and above that, I wasn’t expecting much. I put five years of work into the book, at my own expense. I never thought I would make that money back. I thought it might sell between three and five thousand copies. Gallimard was hoping for a little more, but I was sceptical. Then, quite unexpectedly, everything exploded.
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Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Jonathan Littell / 'In Homs we are all wading in blood'


 A doctor treats a wounded man in Homs. Photograph: AP

'In Homs we are all wading in blood'


Clinics are overwhelmed with casualties as the regime's snipers target anyone who moves in the rebel neighbourhoods
Jonathan Littell
Tuesday 21 February 2012 20.29 GMT


T
he corpse, already waxy, wrapped in its shroud, a crown of plastic flowers around its head, lies in a corner of the mosque. Kneeling next to the coffin, a boy in tears, his brother, strokes his face with infinite tenderness. The dead boy was 13. The night before, around 11 o'clock, he was breaking wood in front of his doorstep. His father, eyes swollen, but upright and dignified among his friends and relatives, tells me what happened: "He probably shone his mobile phone to see what he was doing. And the sniper killed him."

It was neither an accident nor chance. Their street is constantly under fire from this sniper, who, based in the neighbourhood school, practises on cats when he has no other targets. "We don't even dare take out the rubbish any more," a neighbour adds. Another man shows me, on his mobile phone, the corpse of his brother, killed while he was protecting his 11-year-old son, before explaining to me that he had to break down the walls between his house and his neighbours' to get out without exposing himself to gunfire.
After the burial, I pile into a car with three activists to continue on to a neighbourhood further east, Karam al-Zeytoun. At each avenue, the shawari al-maout or "death streets" as people call them, the driver speeds up, foot to the floorboard, to avoid the gunshots. As if on cue, shots ring out ahead of us. We swerve abruptly into a small street. We find ourselves at a makeshift emergency care centre. The staff are holding down a young man whose lower skull has been pierced by a bullet. He twists, vomits a flow of blood, rears up, vomits again; the man treating him, who isn't even a doctor, can do nothing; they bandage up his head and bundle him into a taxi, to rush him to a clinic. A witness explains what happened: the victim, 27 years old according to his ID card, was shot in front of the nearby Said ibn Amer mosque as he was carrying medicine to his parents; one hour earlier, another man was killed coming out of the mosque, by a bullet through the neck.

The witness doesn't even have time to finish his story. New wounded are brought in, an older man hit in the upper chest and a veiled woman, rolling terrified eyes, her jaw split open by a bullet. It's the same sniper as for the young man and he seems to always aim for the neck; this woman was lucky. The man gasps for breath; he is finally evacuated in a delivery van, with a friend lying next to him to hold up the IV-drip. We are all wading in the blood; one of the activists clutches his head, already at the end of his tether. But this is only the beginning. As we are questioning witnesses at the medical assistant's home, we hear more honking and run back to the centre. It's chaos. The two wounded men they had tried to send to a hospital have been brought back, dead; the staff are bustling around three more wounded, hit by a shell blast in front of another first aid point; on the table, a fourth man dies right in front of me, after a brief shudder, without my even realising it. I try to question one of the wounded but then they bring in a baby, hit in the groin.

A little later, after a far-too-long drive down the sniper avenue, I come across a naked man, covered in blood, his hands tied, his head crushed flat, being paraded in triumph on a Free SyriaArmy (FSA) pickup truck. It is the body of a shabiha, a regime militia man, who was lynched 20 minutes ago.
Three days later, similar scenes are repeated in Bayarda, a bastion of the opposition in the northern part of the city. This time we won't even have to leave the building where we're staying: the first aid centre is on the ground floor. The first wounded man is brought in just before noon, his abdomen pierced by a bullet as he was trying to protect his children from the shots of a sniper hidden on the roof of the neighbourhood post office; his son soon follows, with two fingers shot off. Another man has already been killed in the same place, we are told. Two hours later, it's a 10-year-old boy, whose thick black hair I stroke as the doctor binds his hands with gauze. The bullet, which went through his chest, killed him on the spot. His cousin gazes at the little body and sobs: "Praise to God, praise to God." There will be a last one before evening, a man shot through the lungs, who will barely survive.

Near a wide avenue, I am shown a long metal pole with a hook welded to the end: it is used to recover the wounded, as well as the dead. The snipers shoot at everyone, women, children, first aid workers, for no reason whatsoever. Unless it's to punish the stubborn population of the rebel neighbourhoods, collectively guilty for refusing to bow their heads and silently obey their lord and master.
I wanted to attend the funeral of the little boy, whose name was Taha, but it couldn't be held before I left: the mukhabarat security forces who control the morgue were refusing to release his body unless his father signed a paper certifying his son had been killed by "terrorists", meaning the FSA, of course. There is worse. Later on the day of the killings in Karam al-Zeytoun, the activists learn that an entire family has been murdered at home, in a neighbourhood called Nasihine: 11 people, including five children, three with their throats cut. It was a Sunni family that lived at the edge of a neighbourhood dominated by the Alaouite community (the dissident Shiite sect of President Bashar al-Assad's clan and of the leaders of the security forces); testimonies gathered from the scene suggest a sectarian provocation.
The FSA launched reprisal operations the night of the Nasihine massacre. But they were careful to target only military objectives: the checkpoints that covered the killers' escape, and a military intelligence headquarters. The FSA officers, in fact, just like the civilian activists, do everything in their power to resist a sectarian perversion of the revolution. "We are aware that the regime is playing the card of religious clashes," says Muhannad al-Umar, one of the leaders of the Military Council of Baba Amr. "Yes, if the conflict persists, it is likely that we'll plunge into a sectarian conflict, because the Alaouite community unequivocally supports the regime. But if the regime falls, there won't be any reprisals. They are a part of Syrian society, like us."
No one denies that Alaouite civilians have already been the victims of murders or kidnappings, often for use as bargaining chips. The activists I have discussed this with blame uncontrolled fringe groups, especially Bedouin families, a community with a strong blood vengeance tradition, taking revenge on innocent Alaouite civilians, especially when their women or children have been killed or raped. The regime, of course, uses these crimes to paint its adversaries as terrorists. But to me, there is a clear distinction to be made between on one hand the regime's systematic policy of sectarian murder, and on the other the inability of recently constituted and still fragile authorities to rein in the most extremist elements in their camp.
In Bayarda, shortly after Taha's death, I meet a film-maker from Damascus. "There is a religious confrontation under way here, it's undeniable," he acknowledges. "On both sides, there is talk of ethnic cleansing. But it's particular to Homs, it doesn't exist elsewhere. Me, I am a secular man. I must be here. If I am not, then it is a sectarian war. But if it develops better in other cities, if a better version of the revolution prevails, then Homs will be contained."
This is far from given. Since I left the city, on 2 February, it has been bombed daily, massively, and more than 718 people have been killed, according to a detailed list I obtained from the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Communication networks are nearly all down, there is no more bread, and the clinics are overwhelmed with casualties. The west and the Arab League, paralysed by the Russian and Chinese veto, are talking of UN peacekeepers, of humanitarian corridors. This brings back bad old memories. Between 1993 and 1995, when I was in Bosnia, more than 80,000 people were killed in front of the eyes of journalists and aid workers from around the world, and of UN peacekeepers whose mandate allowed them only to shoot rabid dogs. If we have nothing better to offer the Syrian people, we might as well leave them to their fate. It would at least have the virtue of honesty.

• First published in Le Monde. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. (c) Jonathan Littellthe 

THE GUARDIAN






RETRATOS AJENOS
Jonathan Littell

FICCIONES

MESTER DE BREVERÍA

RIMBAUD

DANTE

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Jonathan Littell / Homs, city of torture


 A member of the Free Syrian Army wounded in clashes with government forces.
 Photograph: Tomas Munita/New York Times/Redux/Eyevine


Homs, city of torture



Author Jonathan Littell tells of Assad's security forces targeting medical personnel and how he was smuggled to the heart of the Syrian conflict

 Jonathan Littell
Monday 20 February 2012 23.50 GMT

I
n Bashar al-Assad's Syria, it is not just forbidden to speak, demonstrate and protest: it is also forbidden both to give medical treatment, and to receive treatment yourself. Since the beginning of the uprising, the regime has been waging a merciless war against any individual or institution capable of bringing medical aid to the victims of repression. "It's very dangerous to be a doctor or a pharmacist," a pharmacist from the Baba Amro neighbourhood of Homs tells me. Medical personnel are imprisoned – like the nurse in the nearby district of al-Qusayr, arrested the day after he showed me around his hidden emergency-care centre, its carpets covered with plastic tarpaulins to protect them from blood – or killed, like Abdur Rahim Amir, the only doctor in that centre, murdered in cold blood in November by military security, while he sought to treat civilians wounded during the army's assault on Rastan to the north. Or tortured.

In Baba Amro, a nurse from the Homs National Hospital, imprisoned in September, describes the tortures he was subjected to by miming them: he was beaten with a club, blindfolded, whipped, suffered electric shocks, and hanged from the wall by a single wrist, on tiptoe, for four or five hours – a common practice that has its own name, ash-shabah. "I was lucky, they didn't treat me so badly," he insists. "They didn't break my bones." Sometimes, the regime's forces just insult them. A Red Crescent nurse, in her ambulance, was stopped at a checkpoint: "We shoot them, and you save them!" the soldiers berated them.
The two city hospitals, the civilian (called the "National") and the military one, are under the thumb of the security forces, and their rooms and basements have been turned into torture chambers. The private clinics, last resort for the wounded of the insurrection, are subjected to permanent assault. In one, in the heart of the old city, two nurses show me the impact of bullets in the windows, walls and beds, fired by the army from the nearby citadel. Aside from these two nurses, the clinic is empty. "We can only accept emergency cases and we don't keep anyone for more than a few hours. The security forces come here regularly and arrest everyone they find. The doctors have had to sign a pledge not to take care of demonstrators."
As they speak, a bullet slaps into the room next to ours. Everyone laughs. "Ever since the Free Syrian Army (FSA) established itself in the neighbourhood," continues one of the nurses, "the wounded can be brought here." The rebel army also transports doctors for operations, when it's possible. Five days earlier, the clinic received a man with his belly torn open: a first surgeon was able to operate, but needed a specialist to complete the procedure. The neighbourhood, however, was sealed off, making it impossible to bring the specialist in and impossible to transfer the patient to another hospital. "In the end he died," concludes the nurse.

Abu Hamzeh, a highly trained surgeon, tries to care for the wounded who arrive daily at an emergency first aid point in the city. He is so desperate about the lack of resources – his centre has no anaesthetics, no medical imaging equipment, he can't operate on anyone, just bandage them and give them saline drips – that he wants to give up medicine and take up arms. "I'm useless here," he mutters bitterly in front of a man with his abdomen perforated by a sniper bullet, "completely useless." When the uprising first began, Abu Hamzeh was working at the Homs military hospital, and he witnessed the tortures inflicted on wounded demonstrators, sometimes even by nurses or doctors, whose names he carefully recorded. When the head doctor of the hospital tried to forbid such practices, they simply became more discreet. "One day, I treated a patient in the emergency room. The next day he was sent to the CT room for a brain trauma he didn't have the previous day. That's how I discovered that they did things to him at night. After two days the patient died from his brain trauma. He would not have died from the injuries I treated the first day."
Horrified, Abu Hamzeh managed to procure a camera-pen in Beirut, and secretly recorded, with the help of a nurse, four short videos in a post-operative care room. In the clips you can see five patients, completely or nearly naked beneath the sheets, blindfolded, one ankle chained to the bed. The doctor's hand uncovers their bodies: two of them bear large fresh red marks on the torso, the result of flogging. Lying on a table are the torture instruments: two supple whips, rubber straps cut out from tyres and reinforced with duct tape, and an electric cable with a plug on one end and a clamp on the other, to be attached to the fingers, feet or penis. One of the injured men groans incessantly. "They had blocked their catheters," Abu Hamzeh exclaims. "When I came in they begged for something to drink. I opened the catheters and changed the urine bags, which were full, but two of the patients went into a coma because of kidney failure. When I changed their bandages, I noticed gangrene on one of the patients; I told this to the orthopaedic section but wasn't able to follow up. Three days later I heard they had cut his leg off above the knee."

Abu Hamzeh, who recently resigned his position in order to join the opposition, was quickly sidelined. But the practices he describes have only intensified over the past months. In Baba Amro, we are taken to meet R, a wounded man whose leg has been amputated, and who was just released from the military hospital. In late December a shell fell in his street, killing five of his neighbours and relatives. In the little video they show me, you can see R bundled into a vehicle, his leg half-torn off, just held in place by a hastily tied scarf. The first private clinic where he was brought was overwhelmed with wounded, and they tried to transfer him to another one, along with his 28-year-old nephew, whose left arm was attached by nothing more than a few scraps of flesh. But the ambulance transporting them was intercepted at a security forces checkpoint, where the two wounded men were arrested, placed in an armoured vehicle, and taken to the military hospital. There, without receiving any medical attention, handcuffed to their beds and blindfolded, they were tortured for eight hours. "They hit me with food trays, on my head and body. They tied ropes to my wounded leg and pulled in all directions. They did many other things to me, but I don't remember them."
The men torturing him weren't even trying to get information, they just insulted their victims: "Ah, you want freedom, well here's your freedom!" His nephew died from the torture; finally, R was transferred to the operating room for surgery. Afterwards, he was imprisoned, without any post-operative follow-up: his leg got infected, and six days later it was summarily amputated by a military doctor. I am shown a picture of him upon his release: his skin sallow, his cheeks sunk, skeletal, but softly glad to be alive. "They killed me, back there," he concludes, his eyes shining. "I should never have come out alive."
Such practices are in no way isolated cases, individual initiatives fuelled by sadism or overzealousness, outside of any control. On the contrary, they are codified and regulated by a set of procedures far older than the current uprising, as Abu Salim, a military doctor who served for two years in the mukhabarat, the Department of Military Intelligence, before defecting to the opposition to run a makeshift clinic in Homs, testifies: "What is the mission of a mukhabarat medical doctor?" he calmly asks as my tape recorder runs. "I will explain it to you. Firstly: to keep alive the people subjected to torture so that they can be interrogated for as long as possible. Secondly: in case the person being interrogated loses consciousness, to attend to him so that the interrogation can continue. Thirdly: to supervise the use of psychotropic drugs during the interrogation. We used chlorpromazine [an anti-psychotic drug prescribed, usually, for schizophrenia], valium, and rubbing alcohol – for instance, by pouring a litre into the nose, or else by subcutaneous injection. Fourthly: if the person being tortured has reached his threshold of resistance and is in danger of death, the doctor can request his hospitalisation. However, the doctor cannot make the decision: he must write a report and the officer in charge of the interrogation then decides whether or not to grant the transfer. Before the revolution, almost everyone was transferred; now, it's only the important prisoners. The others are left to die."
• First published in Le Monde. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. (c) Jonathan Littell.
• Tomorrow: How Assad's regime is inflicting a brutal collective punishment on the civilians of Homs
This article was amended on 21 February 2012. Information that was inconsistent with Guardian editorial guidelines has been removed.





RETRATOS AJENOS
Jonathan Littell

FICCIONES

MESTER DE BREVERÍA

RIMBAUD

DANTE


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Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Jonathan Littell / The refusal to talk to hostage-takers has sucked the US and UK into war


The refusal to talk to hostage-takers has sucked the US and UK into war

For Obama and Cameron, the political cost of the hostages’ deaths is far higher than any ransom
A
few months ago, the New York Times published a lengthy piece of investigative journalism detailing different countries’ policies on paying ransoms for journalists, aid workers or ordinary citizens taken hostage throughout the world, in particular by Islamist militant groups. The article pressed the case for the US and British policy of never – ever – negotiating for hostages, while presenting the covert European policy of paying ransoms as perverse, self-defeating and possibly even criminal. Its headline made this conclusion clear: “By paying ransoms, Europe bankrolls Qaeda terror.”
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Jonathan Littell wins the Goncourt prize




Jonathan Littell wins the Goncourt prize

Associated Press
Monday 6 November 2006 15.27 GMT
American writer Jonathan Littell won France's prestigious Goncourt prize today with a 900-page novel narrated by a Nazi SS officer - and written in French.
Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) has garnered wide attention in France both for its subject matter and the nationality of its author. The Goncourt is France's most prestigious literary honour.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The 5 Most Accurate (And Entertaining) Historical Fiction Novels



Jonathan Littell
Poster by T.A.

The 5 Most Accurate (And Entertaining) Historical Fiction Novels


By Alan Brightside
May 13, 2014

When it comes to portraying history, writers are notorious for bending truth to tell the story they think their audience wants to hear. A character’s villainous or heroic traits are exaggerated, the timing of events are fudged, and once-popular opinions that offend modern sensibilities are left out completely. The worst offenders, almost invariably in Hollywood, spin whole alternate histories from thin air and present them as a more-or-less accurate portrait of events (I’m looking at you, Braveheart).
The claim that bad history should be excused ‘because it makes a better story’ doesn’t hold as much water as it once did – mostly thanks to the efforts of authors in the last twenty years who’ve made a name for themselves with both storytelling talent and their fidelity to the historical record.
Here are some of their most outstanding works.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel


One of the most highly regarded works of the last decade, Wolf Hall is an ambitious retelling of Henry VIII’s tempestuous struggle with the Catholic Church, English aristocracy, and his own wife. Though the story of the King’s divorce is well-trodden territory for both fiction and non-fiction, Mantel embraces the perspective of the quintessential outsider Thomas Cromwell, a man whose common origins and meteoric rise to power represented an almost unprecedented episode in Tudor-era England. With its detailed portrayal of competing court factions and the vigorous rise of Protestantism, Wolf Hall bypasses the salacious details of Henry’s romances in favor of painting a portrait of a European court gripped with the fever of religious and secular reform.

The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell


Jonathan Littell’s harrowing epic of the Second World War is told from the perspective of one of literature’s most conflicted protagonists – a scholar and an SS officer, an idealist and a murderer. His fictional character of Maximilian Aue embraces fascism out of his disenchantment with the Weimar regime and post-War Europe, only to see its promises of reform and cultural rejuvenation ground to dust in the horrors of the Eastern Front. As a veteran of the Einsatzgruppen and later a senior officer in the Nazi Party’s intelligence service, Aue’s perspective allows the reader to explore the evolution of the “Final Solution” as it’s first haphazardly applied in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, then codified and industrialized during the latter years of the war. The degradations and horrors that Aue both suffers and inflicts during the course of the war leave him as a deeply unreliable narrator, but Littell’s fidelity to documented facts of the conflict leave this as an invaluable primer on Fascism, the Holocaust, and the Eastern Front.

The Winter King, Bernard Cornwell


If you want to write a historical novel set in a period where there will be few facts to contradict you, consider the post-Roman period of Britain. Historians know less about this violent and chaotic time than the full millennium that preceded it, giving rise to fantastical legends like the tales of King Arthur and his knights. Cornwall, a writer whose novels of the Napoleonic war are wildly popular in Britain, excels by forgoing fantasy in favor of the humanization of fantastic characters, placing them in a well-researched and believable world. Instead of Camelot, Cornwall’s Arthur lives in a wooden hall, and spends his days summers fighting Saxon invaders from mainland Europe rather than elves and giants. Cornwall’s image of Britain in the 6th century is rooted in solid scholarship and may represent the most accurate fictional portrayal of this time period in literature. In many ways, The Winter King mirrors a contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction – its characters live in the ruins of a once-great Roman civilization, learning to live without the technologies and social structures which their world was once built upon.

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel


Though it’s been overshadowed by her latter work, Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety is one of the most complete retellings of the French revolution in the English language, and an invaluable guide for understanding the events of that period as they unfolded. By vividly illustrating the backgrounds and personalities of the lawyers, writers, and aristocrats who played a central role in overthrowing the ancien régime, Mantel conjures up the spirits of the life-or-death struggle that played out across the political landscape of 18th century France. Borrowing heavily from the text of speeches and attributable comments, Mantel illustrates with startling color how the incremental reforms introduced by Louis XVI unleashed a flood of opposition to the regime, and the spiraling conflict as the forces of revolution and counter-revolution both vie for ascendancy.

Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth


If Sacred Hunger has one lesson to impart, it’s that the mid 18th century was a challenging time to be a progressive – even a rich one. Working men and women were ground up like grist in the mill of the British Empire, and the institution of slavery was accepted as readily as neo-liberal economics is today. Sacred Hunger explores the contradiction of ‘enlightenment’ Europe indulging in the transatlantic slave trade with horror-inducing detail, from the counting houses in London to the shores of West Africa and further. Without missing a beat, Unsworth jumps between the lives of aristocratic gentlemen in London and downtrodden British tars off Florida, tying them together in an inexorable web of commerce and compulsion- all in the service of the hunger for profit, which “…justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes.”



IMGISM


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