Because violence is the real theme here, and random unbearable destinies. How to understand, justify, the fate of millions of people in the camps? Becoming this way the martyrdom of an entire continent?
Throughout his life, the narrator wondered, to borrow a title of Primo Levi, on "the elect and the damned" those who are doing and those on which the misfortune and suffering are bent. And in the middle that is left, except one who spectator of history, can decide whether or not to intervene?
Because ultimately, what distinguishes the executioners of martyrs? What is this evil that seized some sporadically among men? Is it foolishness or real evil? A slip of the story or a real consequence of the failure of political and moral European?
Two courses are embedded in the story, that of the unknown grandfather, and the narrator; but this double narrative is also enclosed in a double story, that of the Second World War and the two families, connected haphazardly and yet diametrically opposed Fabre and Wagner.
Everyone eventually haunted by the question of fault, guilt, and responsibility. The usual responses "it was another time", "another would have done worse than me", "everyone has received madness", remain questions to shade the good human consciousness.
In France particularly, the issue of collaboration remains a disorder in civilization.
The grandfather (ultimately adoptive) was prefect of the narrator in Normandy during the Vichy regime. But who can say that he would have acted differently?
In "The Fall", Albert Camus concludes his story this way while the hero's life is in question after being unable to react in time to save the life of a woman: "It is too late, it is still too late, fortunately ... "And that's the whole edifice of his consciousness collapses.
But while Fabrice Humbert asks what evil of man, and complacent about the deadly weakness, we can evoke the reflection of the philosopher Hannah Arendt about the trial of a Nazi officer tried in Israel, "Eichmann in Jerusalem , investigates the banality of evil. "
The philosopher support this thesis on a terribly human evil, the apathy of the masses who renounce their own judgment in favor of stereotyped thinking, violent and without opposition.
And that is ultimately what danger, always present, always latent, like "the blind spot of human reason" which we must protect the public space.
Ultimately, it is this gray area, madness, which seems so distant, that overturns one day the narrator's life.
The lesson of this book, which reads in one go, is that it must be prepared to deal with personal violence, at its own capacity to face the shadows, hoping for the day, echoing the phrase Camus, it will not be too late, but it will be time: ready to face the opaqueness of the reasons of man and of history.
This novel reads like a thriller investigation, even though some parts of the story do not leave unscathed. A book we recommend reading.
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Interview with Fabrice Humbert
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This book is an investigation on the past, on the journey of a man, but also a troubled period of history. How to achieve such strong handle two dimensions? Both family, field staff, and history, the war? How to move from one subject to another and especially how to link in the working memory and writing?
The shift from the individual to history is necessary since the idea of the book is that we are always, at any time, penetrated by history. In this case, the fate of David Wagner is significant that period and even the narrator is heir, like all of us of that period.
After all this work of reflection and research, how do you situate the origin of evil? Is it banal human, all the more dangerous as it does not belong to an exceptional historical anomaly but rather a civilization's penchant? Or is she a terrible and unique fact that we can only hope never to see the resurgence?
This question can have an answer and that is why it is interesting. We can only roam around this question again and again, trying to reduce some obvious causes (poverty, ignorance ...) knowing however that evil exists also in the best conditions. But if we knew the origin of Evil, we could heal it. But no one is able because there is no single explanation and because it remains even once untangled explainable causes, an impenetrable mystery
What share between fiction and biographical elements? Or is that like any good magician do not you reveal this kind of source?
Everything is done to build an autobiographical connection to the reader, that it believes in the truth of the facts because-autobiographical reading seems establish a stronger bond than the novel reading. But the exact sharing of truth and fiction, I am happily single judge.
