THE PROPAGANDIST
CÉCILE DESPRAIRIES (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones.
Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Very much like My Dinner with Andre, only French and about Nazi collaborators, in their own damning words.
What a book to write from one's own experiences. I'm amazed she was not more vilified, as it seems her brother had the most powerful negative response to publishing what amounts to the filthiest of dirty laundry. The author "is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. She is the author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime. Born in Paris in 1957, The Propagandist is her first novel," though certainly not her first book (publisher's provided biographical info). I think my favorite title of hers is "Ville Lumière, Années Noirs" or roughly "City of Light in Years of Darkness" about the Nazi occupation. I wish someone would translate it because my days of slugging through big honkin' books in French are gone.
Lucie, the Propagandist of the title, was married to an Aryan named Friedrich before the convenient marriage to the narrator's rich father. It was Friedrich, the One True Love of Lucie's life and an early eugenics researcher, who formed the future matriarch's attitudes ever after. Lucie and her female relatives all use the corruption of French legal and social systems (this is the land of the Dreyfus Affair and the LePens' evil racism, recall) to benefit materially from the vanishing and lack of return of Parisian Jews.
Probably the best time I had reading about these vile people as they sat around discussing their necrotic morality was the details of how exactly the collaborators accomplished this feat of theft. "Listening" to them as they bemoaned being called collaborators and spewed hatred was, frankly, unpleasant. It's a lot like people in the US not protesting ICEstapo's disappearing of people the scum risen to the top don't like. If you're wondering what those "good Germans" and ordinary French collaborators thought of just sitting back and not speaking out, look in a mirror.
The last third of the book dragged past me. The horrified fascination of learning what these entitled sleazebags got up to in order to hide from justice while keeping their ill-got gains wore off; the stars fell from my eyes and my rating. The absence of a central conflict got to me at last. I can't help but praise the author and the book, while tutting over the story as a story.
What I want to say and do at this passage in US political history is very much what the author has done here: Hold an unsparing mirror to the inner workings of "good people" who make excuses for their inaction. Its consequences are real. The Gestapo, loyal only to The Leader, and constrained by no laws, is operating now.
What are you doing to resist it? Are you sitting in your comfy world tutting? At least sending money to help refugees somewhere? Anything? Or are you these detestable Parisian ladies' spiritual descendant?
