HHhH

It is cold in Berlin. Having experienced the beginning of winter in Birmingham, which presents a fine study in grey, unforgiving winters, and the icy adolescent freedom of sleeping in that downstairs concrete nightmare in Mount Pleasant, I had optimistically thought, through such formative experiences, that I had developed a firm and precise understanding of the notion of cold, the different evocations of cold. That sort of cold that leaves a perpetual dripping nose, the cold of damp windows weeping with condensation, bitter fields of hoar frost in school shorts preparing bold colonial children of the nineties for some strange future of deprivation. So it is with a bittersweet pleasure in Germany the combined impact of indoor heating and these stoutly glazed windows, that that cruel winter future promised to us as children is to be put on hold, at least until we return to New Zealand. Of course you walk outside and it is cold, that future becomes bracingly present. It was cold enough that my thick woollen jumper, thick overcoat and unravelling scarf have been rendered like a thin cotton shawl, like those sad shorts of Middleton Grange School. Although there was a point where I got to wear Andrew's shorts, and boy did those shorts a) not fit me and b) cover my knees. Also we did have those cool long socks, which sadly never made the extension to the adult world apart from in Football, although stopped wearing them for the social football of Nelson and never looked back. 

So, back to thesis point, as I generally do when the weather is getting gloomy and the grim reality of the geopolitical landscape is slipping ever closer to collapse, I read a novel set during the Second World War. In this case it was more a book about writing a book about the Second World War, or the challenges of writing historical fiction. It was very meta, unlike the other book that springs to mind when I think of die Zweite Welt Krieg, Jonathan Littel's  " The Kindly Ones", which in its own way was meta in a sort of arch attempt to highlight our gross fascination with the Nazi regime, and by our I mean, readers like me, Dad, and presumably people that read "The Kindly Ones" and, by extension, "HHhH". Both books are by French authors, and both have a queasy sense of grappling with French complicity in the whole affair. But, in reflecting, not that I have reread "The Kindly Ones" recently or probably will ever as it is a nightmare, "HHhH" was the finer book and I am disappointed I chose to read this book over the most recent book, a considerably lesser novel from the author of "The Emperor of Lies", whose name escapes me, his latest being a meditation I guess on the euthanasia programme. Note the grandiose names of these books, compared with the enigmatic almost scientific approach the publisher took with "HHhH" - although the author apparently wanted "Operation Anthropoid" for the title which is less enigmatic, but more boys own adventure . Depending on your perspective that is either a really good thing, or a terrible thing.
Such concerns could be also be courteously extended to the novel, whose premise follows the plot to kill Reinhard Heydrich, and at parts reads like the pot boiler thriller or at least a digressive and deeply postmodern analysis of said formula. Laurent Binet, the author, seems pathologically concerned with verisimilitude in this novel, making use of historical invention but deeply concerned about this whole approach at the same time.
Which is fair enough, how are we to know what a character thought? Or what occurs in the minds of others? Another French writer Flaubert was so consumed by this issue, I know this because it came up in "The Rings of Saturn" by Sebald and I can't imagine him doing something to the story that wasn't entirely necessary, every sentence seems important.

"Janine had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert's writing, that fear of the false which, she said, sometimes kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months on end in the dread that he would never be able to write another word without compromising himself in the most grevious of ways. Moreover, Janine said, he was convinced that everything he had written hitherto consisted solely in a string of the most abymsal errors and lies, the consequences of which were immeasurable. Jainine maintained that the source of Flaubert's scruples were to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere.."

So important, anyway. Can't really remember where I was going with this. Which seems as good a place as any to end.