Obnoxious, pretentious, and very, very tedious.
Laurent Binent doesn't like fiction, because it's "telling lies." And he doesn't like history, because, well, I mean, who knows what's history? The car might have been blue, it might have been black. So very, very important. So little Laurent has come up with Something new: it's called, Writing About Myself.
On and on, and amazingly drearily, on he goes. Does he buy that rare book by Heydrich's widow? (He does, eventually. Whew, what a relief.) Does his girlfriend kick him to the curb when all he can say when he's told the date of her sister's wedding is Oh wow, that's the anniversary of the assassination!? (Sadly, no. or so he let's us think ...) My usual rule is to grimly read 50 pages, and then I'm outta here. Can't tell you if I make it, as -- and how edgy, how very meta is this? -- the pages aren't numbered. (I'll leave a space for an awed silence ...) I made it to #44 of the painful mini-chapters.
This is actually an insult to the two brave men who assassinated Heydrich, and the innocents who suffered terrible reprisals. I'm going to look for a book -- fiction or history -- that actually does the subject justice.
Laurent Binent doesn't like fiction, because it's "telling lies." And he doesn't like history, because, well, I mean, who knows what's history? The car might have been blue, it might have been black. So very, very important. So little Laurent has come up with Something new: it's called, Writing About Myself.
On and on, and amazingly drearily, on he goes. Does he buy that rare book by Heydrich's widow? (He does, eventually. Whew, what a relief.) Does his girlfriend kick him to the curb when all he can say when he's told the date of her sister's wedding is Oh wow, that's the anniversary of the assassination!? (Sadly, no. or so he let's us think ...) My usual rule is to grimly read 50 pages, and then I'm outta here. Can't tell you if I make it, as -- and how edgy, how very meta is this? -- the pages aren't numbered. (I'll leave a space for an awed silence ...) I made it to #44 of the painful mini-chapters.
This is actually an insult to the two brave men who assassinated Heydrich, and the innocents who suffered terrible reprisals. I'm going to look for a book -- fiction or history -- that actually does the subject justice.
