“The 'banality of evil' finds beautiful, spare expression in this remarkable novella” Ian McEwan
“A sparse, beautiful and shocking novel that finds a more intimate route into the Holocause”
Sunday Times
Rights sold to Israel (Am Oved), Italy (Nutrimenti), the Netherlands (Meulenhoff), UK (Portobello, World excl. North America), USA (New Press, North American rights only)
In his latest novel Hubert Mingarelli sets the scene with an isolated company of German soldiers in Poland, tasked with an impossible mission. They must either watch summary executions every day, or venture into the local countryside and bring back “one of them”, in other words a Jew, whom they must then hand over to their commanders and so to certain death.
Weary of the shootings, three men set out one morning, struggling through the snow with empty stomachs and wistful thoughts of home, and no choice but to comply with a manhunt in which they do not believe.
This particular day, almost in spite of themselves, they flush out a young boy hiding in the woods. Then, keen to find food and to delay returning to camp, they head on towards an abandoned house and laborious preparations for a meal with the few provisions available to them. The men have to find wood for a fire to warm them and boil a pot of water. They’re reduced to burning the chairs they’re sitting on, as well as the door behind which they have isolated their prey. Mingarelli’s tour de force comes when he juxtaposes his characters around a table for a meal: three German soldiers, a young Jew and a passing Pole whose outspoken anti-Semitism eventually and against all expectations arouses feelings of fraternity in the soldiers towards their prisoner.
This then raises ugly questions: Should the Jew be offered food? And, once the meal has been shared, should he be taken back with them or freed?
It is here that, in his precise and measured style, Mingarelli confronts the reader with his or her own conscience and the murderous logic to which the soldiers are subjected… By calling on the fear, reason, hope, madness and humanity within each of us.
Hubert Mingarelli lives near Grenoble. He is the author of highly regarded works, having published nearly a dozen novels and collections of short stories, including Quatre soldats (Le Seuil, winner of the 2003 Prix Médicis). He has also written novels for young adults.
L'auteur
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