Samuél Lopez-Barrantes's Blog, page 3

The Paris Writers’ Salon Live No. 4

This was a fun one. It was recorded in a space and I have called home for the last four years, which in a few short weeks will be just another Parisian memory.

John & Augusta & Armagnac

I have a lot to say about my life on Rue de La Roquette over the last four years, but that’s for a different time. Suffice to say, for now, that it felt fitting to record one final episode of The Paris Writers’ Salon in a home that means quite a lot to me … not just since 2021, when Augusta and I fell in love and she decided to build a new life in this small Parisian apartment above a kebab shop, but much further back, over a decade ago, when a kind Irishman who I met at a party near Notre Dame quickly became a close friend and graciously allowed my down-and-out-twentysomething-self to do laundry in his apartment, many years before it became my home.

I’ll be writing about Rue de La Roquette in weeks to come, but it’s not something I want to do off the cuff, so for now, just a BIG THANK YOU to all of my paying subscribers for the support and inspiration over the past years, which has had A DIRECT RESULT in allowing me to move into an apartment. There’s no need for hyperbole here: supporting working artists can change working artists’ lives (for the first time in my sixteen years as a working writer in Paris, I’m moving into an apartment where I can write not just on a desk, but in a room with a closed door!).

if not, Paris is a reader-supported publication.

As put it in a recent Substack interview with , who has been a consistent champion of my work on this space and has actively participated in changing my life in various ways, it’s hard to describe just how much Substack support can help writers build a life that fosters creativity during an era when making a living from art alone is near impossible:

“When you pay a writer to read their writing, that money is going straight back into the work, whether it’s via a good hot meal or a new computer or a [writing desk at home] or a train ticket to the countryside where they can focus on that manuscript, that’s why if you can, you pay, because you’re helping bring about that artists next creation […]

New creations are coming, some in physical book form—stay tuned—and in this particular historical moment of so much noise, negativity, and mass-marketed destruction, it seems to me that

creating and generosity remains the best antidote to zero-sum greed and destruction.

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Below, paying subscribers can listen to a video recorded at the legendary Mary Duncan’s literary salon a few weeks ago, where I performed a set of original songs and also discussed my latest novel, The Requisitions.

The song is an original called “Annabelle” (some of you have heard it in a different version sometime before), which is about somebody who has everything she was told she was supposed to want in life—the romance, the house, the dog, the picket-fence—and yet all she can think about is how happy she used to be as a child, “when I was just a girl I was so happy alone, now I’m losing touch with the Annabelle I used to know.”

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The Utter Emptiness of Explaining Art

an unexplained image; or, the shadow of memory

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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Some people say the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark is the finest museum in the world. It’s easy to understand why.

The museum, considered a masterpiece of Danish architecture, is an unpretentious combination of hard angles, warm woods, and large panes of glass that both reflect and welcome the verdant landscape overlooking the Øresund, the vastly blue Nordic sound that separates Denmark from Sweden.

Even if the Louisiana were nothing more than a building to walk through and admire, it’d be worth the visit, but it just so happens that since its construction in 1958, the Louisiana has fused artistry, architecture and landscape into a singular experience that only three expert Scandinavian architects could muster.

There is a combination of severity and warmth to the place that cannot be explained, only experienced while walking through the international exhibits and their masterpiece halls (be still, my hygge heart!). And, like the layered Nordic landscape that defines this place, art reveals itself as a palimpsest at the Louisiana, a message written on top of another, a half-erased idea sketched upon tracing paper and superimposed upon the world.

In this this particular exhibit’s featured artist, Firelei Báez, however, the natural beauty of the artwork becomes political overwrought with history. “Do not trust history,” Firelei Báez tells us in a filmed interview on a screen, which immediately distracts from her masterful paintings. “Trust memory over history.”

It’s an admirable sentiment, but given the amount of descriptions of artwork in this museum, there’s just one problem: throughout Báez’s monumental exhibition, the visitor is encouraged to make sense of their own past memory via the artwork, and yet they are encouraged to do so by listening to Báez’s explanations and by dense academic literature on the walls, which the curators deem necessary to understand Báez’s paintings.

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What was that again about trusting memory over history? In Báez’s paintings, the depiction of plumage and hair and coarse skin depicts an undeniable humanity that glows beneath, glowing embers of a collective consciousness that ultimately succumbs to the far-more-political narrative of post-colonialist life. At the Louisiana, Báez’s work is presented as an ideological commentary product of contemporary life due to its exhausting exhaustive details about the various and brutal historical truths of European colonialism human history.

To be clear, as someone who spent the last decade writing a novel about the unlearned lessons from history, I’m the first to believe that artists engaging with the past have a responsibility to speak truth to the vast structures of chauvinist white-supremacist power that seek to erase history. There is no such thing as apolitical art when it comes to making art about history, but in this particular analysis of Báez’s work, it seems to me that the explanation of her politics relegates her work’s otherworldliness spirit to the all-too-twenty-first-century realm of politicized moralism. Instead of allowing the visual elements alone to speak truth to power, the lengthy explanations about why her work is important become unnecessary at best and pandering at worst.

if not, Paris i“Do not trust history,” Firelei Báez tells us. “Trust memory over history.”

To insert an analogy of a short-sighted elder pressing their nose into a painting’s description so they can appreciate understand it, the explanations of Báez’s work do little more than blow hot air onto the lens of individual memory. Thankfully (at least for now), museumgoers aren’t obligated to read the writings on the wall. But alas, in a subsequent room, the audio recording of Báez’s explanation about why her work is important rings loud and clear—colonialism was, is, and always will be violent, brutal, dehumanizing, if you didn’t get the memo—at which point it becomes near-impossible for the visitor to contemplate the work trust their own interpretations of history memory.

My issue with this contemporary need to politicize art is that it panders to ideology, which inevitably pits one side against another (it doesn’t matter that I happen to agree with Báez’s politics; as a museum-goer, not giving museumgoers the option to ignore the ideological lens through which the artwork is created betrays one of art’s most important qualities: its ability to transcend political, social, and cultural divides).

s a reader-supported publication.

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Of course, nobody at the Louisiana is forcing me to read the lengthy explanations next to Báez’s glorious paintings, but when the text explaining a piece of art takes longer to read than to witness the work itself, museum curators betray the deepest truth about authentic artwork, which is that ideology artistry exceeds precedes explanation.

Such is the truth conveyed in Báez’ colorful brushstrokes and mythological creatures painted on top of old colonialist maps, a medium that in itself tells the viewer all they need to know about the artist’s particular opinion about reclaiming a colonized past. Until it is explained by academics, her work defies classification without relinquishing its own identity, and this truth is most evident in a painting depicting la ciguapa, wherein a shapeshifting, mythological female creature that is near-impossible to hunt because of its backward-facing feet conquers the space of an old colonialist map.

see the painting: Untitled (A Map of the British Empire in America, 2021)

Much la ciguapa, the beauty of Báez’s work resides in its fluidity and defiance of description, which is why it’s such a distraction bummer when the artist’s voice rings out in the exhibition room, "La ciguapa is a creature that cannot be controlled or contained.” I can see that, one wishes to speak into the void. Perhaps that’s why the artist drew la ciguapa stomping all over a colonialist map.

To echo Rilke’s words from up above, the joy and beauty of art resides not in the brain but in the heart, but it seems that at the Louisiana, at least for this exhibit, the esteemed sanctimonious gatekeepers powers that be have forgotten this truth in our identitarian cacophonous age of market-driven desire to identify, classify, and politicize everything.

But what if we let the work speak for itself? Aren’t there are already enough armchair academics and pandering podcast personalities? Exiting the Louisiana Museum, walking the manicured pathway slicing through the soft greens, once again at peace contemplating the Sound, I can’t help but want to amend Rainer Maria Rilke’s wisdom for a metamodern epoch: “works of art are of an infinite solitude, and there is nothing so useless as criticism explanation.”

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The Paris Writers' Salon Live No.3

This one’s for my paying subscribers. Friendly reminder that if you’re ever interested in tuning in for free, we generally meet every fortnight on Sundays at 6 PM (CET) / 11 am EST.

For those who prefer to watch on their phones versus desktop, join us for our next live video in the app:

Get more from Samuél Lopez-Barrantes in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

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Intro to The Paris Writers' Salon

Think of the above video as an ode to the unfinished nature of everything. It is a rough draft. It shan’t be completed. The theme song is mine but I wish I’d recorded a different, cleaner version. Alas, sometimes art is simply meant to be shared, not completed … and there’s something comforting, isn’t there, about the never-ending dialogue that is the City of Light?

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In the winter of 2019, and I began organizing a new business venture: the Paris Writers’ Salon. The idea way back then was to invite internationally renowned writers to John’s home, where we would gather with clients, friends, and acquaintances to discuss life, literature, and all the rest of it.

The acclaimed poet Parneshia Jones, who I met while studying at Vermont College of Fine Arts, had planned to join us, but alas, a global pandemic changed the course of human history. Here is the never-used image that my twin brother designed for what we once thought would be a real-life Paris Writers’ Salon in August 2020:

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Not to be outdone by pesky global pandemics, John and I decided to take The Paris Writers’ Salon online, and what transpired was one of the most fulfilling and edifying literary projects of my life: between December 2021 and April 2024, and I read 40+ books related to France and connected with dozens of curious individuals friends with whom we philosophized over glasses of wine and cups of coffee (albeit virtually; shout out to and and Roxanne Yahner and Pamela Ballard and Jim Hooper in particular for being there for so many illuminating discussions.)1

But all things must pass. After thirteen sessions spanning three years, and due to the decidedly twenty-first century term known as “zoom fatigue,” John and I became busy with non-digital work and grew wary of maintaining a virtual salon at the expense of having our proverbial boots on the ground for a resurgent day-to-day life in Paris.

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The above video was our next idea, thanks to the vision of : a short, episodic documentary series that began with a discussion in John’s apartment, ventured out into the city streets to cover a literary/Parisian theme, and brought it back home with future promises.

But who knew! Filming, editing, producing, and sound-editing videos takes quite a bit of time, and being people who write books, John and I could no longer afford to devote so much time to yet another labor of unpaid love.

And so, as many of you know, John and I have now settled on hosting a semi-weekly Substack Live Paris Writers’ Salon, which allows us to sit down for a drink without too much preparation and delve into the impromptu magic of unplanned dialogues and topical immediacy of week-to-week life in Paris.

While Episode 1 remains free for everyone, only paying subscribers can access subsequent recordings (such as Episode 2, in which John and I discuss our processes writing fiction, flow states, and rediscovering old work), and if you have enjoyed John or my work over the past years, consider becoming a paying subscriber, because what’s sexier than being being a Parisian patron of the arts?

if not, Paris is a reader-supported publication.

Episode 3 will be LIVE on Substack, this Sunday, March 23 at 6PM (CET) / 1pm (EST). All subscribers will be notified before we begin chatting.

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In next week’s post, paying subscribers will gain access to a recording of last week’s intimate piano/vocal performance at the literary salon of another Parisian Legend, Mary Duncan, whose memoir Henry Miller is Under My Bed is just as scandalous as you’d imagine.

In the shadow of Notre Dame in a small Parisian apartment across the street from where Simone de Beauvoir wrote Les Inséperables and The Mandarins, many friends, acquaintances, and new connections from all over the world gathered to hear me play some of my music, discuss Kingdom Anywhere with , and imbibe in wine conviviality and wine.

But alas, I don’t have any photos of that evening, so you’ll just have to imagine it. Here’s to the coming spring and leaning into all that literature and this city continues to offer.

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For a full list of the 40+ books we read, from Guy de Maupassant to Simone de Beauvoir to Ernest Hemingway to Edmund White to James Baldwin and many, many other great authors in between, find the full list at the bottom of this page.

The Paris Writers' Salon Live No. 2

Good sir and I sat down for another chat a few minutes ago. This time we chatted about our respective backgrounds writing fiction over a glass of Irish whiskey. Free subscribers can enjoy the first few minutes / paying subscribers can access the entire discussion.

Paris was on fire today with the half-marathon and fashion week. The springtime energy has popped like a bottle of champagne, from which, rest assured, I have already imbibed a few springtime sips.

Here’s to a lazy Sunday.

Samuél

PS

Sorry for those of you who thought we’d be live at 12pm EST. It turns out the clocks changed last night for folks living across the Atlantic Ocean, which in itself sounds like something from a fiction novel. In our discussion, John and I discuss escapism and writing and the use of drugs in achieving at least one of the two. Jean Cocteau once wrote about the effect that opium has on time (I wrote a song about it, paying subscribers can listen below), which seems fitting since we forgot about the timing:

“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium [or enjoy a literary chat with an old friend over a glass of whiskey] is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.” Jean Cocteau

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The Paris Writers Salon - Ep. 2

Good sir and I sat down for another chat a few minutes ago. This time we chatted about our respective backgrounds writing fiction over a glass of Irish whiskey. Free subscribers can enjoy the first few minutes / paying subscribers can access the entire discussion.

Paris was on fire today with the half-marathon and fashion week. The springtime energy has popped like a bottle of champagne, from which, rest assured, I have already imbibed a few springtime sips.

Here’s to a lazy Sunday.

Samuél

PS

Sorry for those of you who thought we’d be live at 12pm EST. It turns out the clocks changed last night for folks living across the Atlantic Ocean, which in itself sounds like something from a fiction novel. In our discussion, John and I discuss escapism and writing and the use of drugs in achieving at least one of the two. Jean Cocteau once wrote about the effect that opium has on time (I wrote a song about it, paying subscribers can listen below), which seems fitting since we forgot about the timing:

“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium [or enjoy a literary chat with an old friend over a glass of whiskey] is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.” Jean Cocteau

Read more

Paris Writers’ Salon Live No. 1

Two announcements this week about the writing life in Paris:1 - SPILL, Kingdom Anywhere, 2025

Many of you know the story of how I bought back the rights to my debut novel in 2022, and how in 2024, and I founded our own independent publishing venture in Paris, Kingdom Anywhere, so we could publish our work (and the work of others) in a way that we see fit (see: equitable publishing/independence from consumptive interests / creative freedom / a profound disinterest in pandering to the masses economic systems that uphold oligarchs).

Fewer of you know that Kingdom Anywhere is proud to announce TODAY the publication of its second book, SPILL, a glorious debut poetry collection written by our dear friend Mehta, who within twenty-four hours of learning about Kingdom Anywhere handed us a printed manuscript of poems, written over the past decade.

She can say it better than I can, however, and three pictures may speak a thousand more words:

SONDERLUSTCeremonious SynchronicityThis first photo was captured by Augusta Sagnelli last July, when she Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and I went for a nature walk near Poitiers, France…Read more23 days ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Mitalee2 - The Paris Writers’ Salon Live!

Last Sunday evening, I sat down with my good friend / mentor / literary salon co-host / red wine drinking partner in crime , an author whose publishing career has spanned 60 years and 50 books, including sci-fi novels, renowned film biographies (Robert de Niro, Steven Spielberg, Federico Fellini, to name a few), best-selling historical memoirs about life in Paris (The Most Beautiful Walk in the World has become an international reference), and, most recently, Secret Cinema, an independently published book about the porn adult film industry in the 1980s.

Between 2021-2024, John and I ran thirteen renditions of the Paris Writers’ Salon, a 4-part virtual seminar and discussion about some of the most renowned books ever written about Paris. After thirteen renditions, however, we felt it was time for a change, and the above video beckons in a new era of a more laid-back approach to the Paris Writers’ Salon, which, importantly, will be live and so accessible to everyone.

In Part I, and I discuss independent publishing versus traditional publishing, why we aren’t sold on poetry readings, and , our cinematographer extraordinaire, joins us to discuss publishing ’s SPILL and the spirit of Kingdom Anywhere.

This time around, the above recording is free for everyone. Everyone will always be able to join us live, but in the future, only paying subscribers will be able to access the retroactive recordings.

In a French home, the salon is the living room: a place to relax, to socialize, to talk and to listen, an intimate space reserved for close friends. In this spirit, and as the Paris sunshine continues to warm John’s glorious Latin Quarter apartment (Sylvia Beach, the OG founder of Shakespeare & Company, lived just beneath), and I invite you to keep an eye out for Substack Live sessions of the Paris Writers’ Salon, which will usually take place on Sunday evenings at 6pm Paris time / 12 pm EST / 9 am PST (our current schedules allow us to meet at least twice a month).

The next session will take place this Sunday, March 9 at 6PM Paris time.

While the themes may vary, you can be sure that each episode will be devoted to discussions about life, literature, and the literary history of Paris. Our goal is to educate and learn through dialogue, which is why free subscribers will always be able to tune in for free, but only paying subscribers will be able to access the retrospective recordings, because John is a goddamn legend and in a society that insists on valuing almost everything monetarily, if John’s recorded wisdom, storytelling, and generosity isn’t worth the price of 1 coffee/month, I don’t know what is. Or, to put it, another way:

support authors, not billionaires

Leave a comment

Paris Writers’ Salon Live - No. 1

Two announcements this week about the writing life in Paris:1 - SPILL, Kingdom Anywhere, 2025

Many of you know the story of how I bought back the rights to my debut novel in 2022, and how in 2024, and I founded our own independent publishing venture in Paris, Kingdom Anywhere, so we could publish our work (and the work of others) in a way that we see fit (see: equitable publishing/independence from consumptive interests / creative freedom / a profound disinterest in pandering to the masses economic systems that uphold oligarchs).

Fewer of you know that Kingdom Anywhere is proud to announce TODAY the publication of its second book, SPILL, a glorious debut poetry collection written by our dear friend Mehta, who within twenty-four hours of learning about Kingdom Anywhere handed us a printed manuscript of poems, written over the past decade.

She can say it better than I can, however, and three pictures may speak a thousand more words:

SONDERLUSTCeremonious SynchronicityThis first photo was captured by Augusta Sagnelli last July, when she Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and I went for a nature walk near Poitiers, France…Read more8 days ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Mitalee2 - The Paris Writers’ Salon Live!

Last Sunday evening, I sat down with my good friend / mentor / literary salon co-host / red wine drinking partner in crime , an author whose publishing career has spanned 60 years and 50 books, including sci-fi novels, renowned film biographies (Robert de Niro, Steven Spielberg, Federico Fellini, to name a few), best-selling historical memoirs about life in Paris (The Most Beautiful Walk in the World has become an international reference), and, most recently, Secret Cinema, an independently published book about the porn adult film industry in the 1980s.

Between 2021-2024, John and I ran thirteen renditions of the Paris Writers’ Salon, a 4-part virtual seminar and discussion about some of the most renowned books ever written about Paris. After thirteen renditions, however, we felt it was time for a change, and the above video beckons in a new era of a more laid-back approach to the Paris Writers’ Salon, which, importantly, will be live and so accessible to everyone.

In Part I, and I discuss independent publishing versus traditional publishing, why we aren’t sold on poetry readings, and , our cinematographer extraordinaire, joins us to discuss publishing ’s SPILL and the spirit of Kingdom Anywhere.

This time around, the above recording is free for everyone. Everyone will always be able to join us live, but in the future, only paying subscribers will be able to access the retroactive recordings.

In a French home, the salon is the living room: a place to relax, to socialize, to talk and to listen, an intimate space reserved for close friends. In this spirit, and as the Paris sunshine continues to warm John’s glorious Latin Quarter apartment (Sylvia Beach, the OG founder of Shakespeare & Company, lived just beneath), and I invite you to keep an eye out for Substack Live sessions of the Paris Writers’ Salon, which will usually take place on Sunday evenings at 6pm Paris time / 12 pm EST / 9 am PST (our current schedules allow us to meet at least twice a month).

The next session will take place this Sunday, March 9 at 6PM Paris time.

While the themes may vary, you can be sure that each episode will be devoted to discussions about life, literature, and the literary history of Paris. Our goal is to educate and learn through dialogue, which is why free subscribers will always be able to tune in for free, but only paying subscribers will be able to access the retrospective recordings, because John is a goddamn legend and in a society that insists on valuing almost everything monetarily, if John’s recorded wisdom, storytelling, and generosity isn’t worth the price of 1 coffee/month, I don’t know what is. Or, to put it, another way:

support authors, not billionaires

Leave a comment

Politics & Prose

This is Part II of an edited transcript from a recent conversation with ’s online course, Fighting Fascism, at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Read Part I here. Fair warning: heavy themes + light spoilers about my latest novel, The Requisitions1

What was the historical research and inspiration for The Requisitions , and how did you create the characters?

My research began as an undergraduate in the Holocaust Studies Department at the University of Vermont. UVM was home to political scientist/historian Raul Hilberg, one of the founding scholars of Holocaust studies.2 As a senior honors thesis, I wrote a 120-page study of the Nazi-imposed Jewish Councils of Poland (judenräte) and the evolution of how their role has been interpreted since World War Two.3

Raul Hilberg also wrote the book Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders (1992), which was the primary inspiration for the novel’s three protagonists.

· Viktor is loosely based on the Viennese psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, whose psychoanalytic theory (made famous in Man’s Search for Meaning, which Frankl wrote ten days after being liberated from Auschwitz) was a significant influence on my understanding of existentialism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that “He who has a Why can bear [or commit] almost any How.”4

· Carl, a reserve German policeman, is based upon my MA research at University College London, where I applied Viktor Frankl’s theory of the will to meaning try and understand how people commit (and survive) genocide. Carl is a fictional representation of the historian Christopher Browning’s case study Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). I went back and forth about writing a historically precise depiction of RPB 101, but, ultimately, I decided against it because The Requisitions is fiction, and I didn't feel it was wise to start putting words in the mouths of people who actually existed.

· Elsa is based on an earlier version of myself, a young student unsure of what she stands for. I wrote an early draft of The Requisitions while working as a glorified receptionist in a financial office, and lo and behold, Elsa’s character is forced to become a receptionist for the Gestapo (this is where the “write what you know” beauty of fiction comes in … I can assure you, I did not work for the Gestapo). A few years later, I completed an MFA in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I studied historiographic metafiction. This postcolonialist theory, coined by Linda Hutcheon, basically suggests that, unlike most history books, fiction can reveal deeper truths about the complex narrativization of history.5[4]

FINAL CALL for new annual subscribers: before March 1, when you subscribe for the year, you’ll receive a signed copy of The Requisitions

Your book is set in the Łódź Ghetto, but the only historical figure in the novel is the Jewish Council president of Łódź, Mordechai “Chaim” Rumkowski. Why is that?

Rumkowski was the most infamous of all Jewish council leaders because of his authoritarian behavior and despotic “rescue through work” policy. While he does appear in one scene, The Requisitions remains a work of historical historiographic metafiction, which means the only time Rumkowski’s words are portrayed on the page, I paraphrase what he actually said from a historical account as recounted by a survivor named Dr. [Edward] Reicher.

The closest other character to a historical figure is Martin Arendt. He shares his last name with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil caused huge debates within Holocaust Studies. In that text, Arendt exhibited extraordinary cynicism about “Jewish behavior” during the Nazi genocide when she made the absurd ahistorical claim that had it not been for the Jewish Councils of Poland, the Holocaust would not have happened as it did.

This was an irresponsible thing to say for multiple reasons. Obviously, if something hadn’t happened in one way, it would have happened differently—this is counterfactual history and idiotic, in my opinion—but more importantly, Arendt’s claims were patently untrue. Many council members quit their respective positions before deportations began; many others refused to comply with Nazi orders, and no amount of refusal or compliance ever affected the outcome. So what interested me more about Arendt’s harsh claims were both her concept of the “banality of evil” (which Elsa represents as a captive functionary in the Nazi machinery of destruction) and the antiquated taxonomized idea that there is still such a thing as “German” or “Jewish” behavior as opposed to human nature.6

My conclusion in my undergraduate thesis at UVM—which is reflected in The Requisitions—is that it remains a very curious disturbing fact that to this very day, the Nazi genocide engenders misplaced questions concerns about “Jewish” or “German” behavior versus a deeper understanding of how bigotry mutates the universality of the human condition.7

The Requisitions confronts two of the most challenging subjects in Holocaust studies: the roles of the Nazi-imposed Jewish Councils of Poland and the role of “ordinary” Germans in mass open-air shootings in Eastern Europe. Why did you choose to focus on these two topics?

The Requisitions was my best attempt at understanding what, for decades, I was told believed was incomprehensible. In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning has this great quote about being willing to peer into the darkness (“I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader¾both were human¾if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can”) and after so many years studying these subjects as an academic, I felt a responsibility duty to shine some light upon the darkness, first and foremost for myself, lest I become apathetic about humanity.

In short, I thought if I could understand some of the most disturbing aspects of Holocaust Studies, I could learn to locate the humanity that still existed within them. Darkness is only darkness so long as we refuse to illuminate it. So Viktor, Carl, and Elsa each represented the struggle to remain hopeful and decent in the face of tragedy and cruelty.

The book begins with Viktor and Elsa connecting on a terrace. Do you find optimism there?

I really did hear the book’s opening sentence in my head—when the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café. It came to me while I was sitting in a shitty cinder block room in Kentish Town. At the time, I was down and out in London as a graduate student with no money and a lot of loans for a degree that seemed useless—depressed because I was grappling with complex psychoanalytic theory to try and understand how ordinary human beings become mass murderers—and so I wanted to escape all of that, and lo and behold, the sentence popped into my head.

So yes, despite the sirens, Viktor sees Elsa on the terrace, and there’s the possibility of hope there, and that’s the main soul of the story—that there’s always hope or possibility. Despite what some of my readers think, I’m an optimist at heart, but I don’t believe one can achieve actual optimism without trudging through the doldrums of nihilism. And so as I began working on The Requisitions as a disillusioned graduate student, and anytime I became too academic in my thinking about the story or its characters, I took a break. Over the years, I slowly returned to the truth of my own relationship with such a complex history (which, of course, was related to the truth of my own understanding of myself and my connection to my past and my mother, et cetera), and lo and behold, The Requisitions finally resembled me because it was now about a novelist writing himself back into the fictional lives of those who once lived, and in 2024 my wife and I published The Requisitions via our Paris-based imprint, Kingdom Anywhere.

In a word, The Requisitions is my best attempt (so far) to reveal some of the most complicated truths about the human condition; it’s about the interplay between darkness and light, love and anger, apathy and meaning. Whatever the circumstances, we retain the freedom and responsibility to bear witness to the truth. Life is very comfortable these days, despite it also being very scary for a lot of people, and that's one of those paradoxes we’re living in: you can live like a king or a queen or a prince or a princess—hot baths and the best entertainment ever on a screen and food delivered to your door (it's all incredible!)— but there are also terrible realities that exist, too, and everything we consume can, of course, consume us, too. Optimism is about acknowledging the interplay between light and dark versus running away from it. There’s a reason that the forest is an essential symbol in the novel, too (both literally and philosophically), so let's remember to venture out into the proverbial woods from time to time because staying inside is its own form of imprisonment.

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Two brief notes before bidding you adieu:

SUBSTACK FRIENDS: Sunday, March 2 at 6 PM CET / 12 PM EST / 9 AM PST & I will host a live rendition of the Paris Writers’ Salon via Substack Live. Episode 1: poetry readings & indie publishing in Paris. Free subscribers can tune in for the live chat. Paying subscribers will be able to access a future recording. Use your app / go to Substack’s website to find us on SUBSTACK LIVE, SUNDAY @ 12 PM EST.

PARIS FRIENDS: Wednesday, March 5 at 7 PM (CET) at Le Centre Culturel-Chambre Noire, 96 Blvd de la Villette (75019) & I are proud to announce the publication of Kingdom Anywhere’s second book, SPILL by Mehta. All copies are printed, limited & numbered in Paris. Be there or be a baguette.

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A note about the voiceover recording: my written answers are somewhat different & offer more context because I’m my own PR team and creative license. I’ve also removed the participants’ voices in the recording out of respect for privacy. There are also significant spoilers in the audio recording. Consider yourself warned.

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Hilberg’s three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) is a seminal work in the field of Holocaust Studies.

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BA Thesis: “The Jewish Councils of Poland: The Evolution of Historical Interpretation”

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MA Dissertation: “The Humanness of Cruelty: Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl, and the Psychology of Genocide”

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Salman Rushdie was one of the first to employ historiographic metafiction in Midnight's Children and Anthony Doerr plays with it in All the Light We Cannot See, but the most influential inspiring novel for me was HHhH by Laurent Binet, which was the first time I read a book that questioned history writing how the past has been narrativized, and I thought, what a liberation to investigate my own relationship to history while also writing a novel set during World War Two.

MFA Dissertation: “History is Dead, Long Live History! Postmodernism & Historiographic Metafiction”

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This is why Viktor does not identify as Jewish even though he is defined taxonomized as Jewish by Nazi “race” laws. We often forget that not everyone the Nazis labeled as “Jewish” identified as such; additionally, many people forget that the Nazis systematically murdered not six million but over 11 million human beings (6 million Jews, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, 3.3 million Russian POWs, and hundreds of thousands of others, including Romani, artists, homosexuals, intellectuals, disabled persons). Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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To quote Raul Hilberg: “Once more, it should be emphasized that the Jewish Councils were not the willful accomplices of the Germans. Within the German superstructure, however, they were its indispensable operatives. Even when their activities were benign, as in the case of housing refugees or promoting sanitary conditions, they could contribute to the overall purposes and ultimate goals of their German supervisors.” From "The Judenrat and the Jewish Response" in The Holocaust as Historical Experience, ed. Yehuda Bauer & Nathan Rotenstreich (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1981), 165.

Of Politics & Prose (Part I)

This is Part I of an abridged conversation with Politics & Prose (Washington D.C.) about The Requisitions, my latest novel about history, memory, and the Nazi occupation of Poland. Big thanks to Bob and Susan for inviting me to the bookstore, and for choosing The Requisitions as part of her online course, Fighting Fascism: Three Novels and a Guide to Resistance.

In Part One, I discuss Nazism, the humanness of hope and cruelty, and what I think about the success of Squid Game. Part Two (next week) will be partially-paywalled, as it has major spoilers, covers the narrative structure of The Requisitions, and it will be the first time I speak about the “controversial” ending.1

Until March 1, new annual paying subscribers will receive a signed copy of The Requisitions. Those renewing their annual subscriptions in March: something new is coming. Stay tuned.

Q: It isn’t said enough that it wasn't just the Nazis who killed. In Ukraine and Poland especially, many locals killed and hunted their fellow human beings in the forest—and then they went back, and they did it again and again. The Nazis often used the local populations because their regular soldiers couldn’t take it, and the world hasn’t really understood or remembered that it wasn’t just the Nazis who committed genocide.

That's an important point. People also often forget that when we’re discussing the Nazi genocide, we’re talking about eleven million human beings. It was a different systematic policy of genocide for the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust (which is a term usually reserved for Jewish victims), but the Nazis systematically murdered another 5 million human beings, particularly Poles and Russians, which many people forget.

In The Requisitions, Martin represents one of those smaller groups of victims (gay men), and part of the challenge of writing a book about the Nazi genocide is that it’s such a vast subject. There are so many ways to write about it, and there's no real way to write about it honestly comprehensively because whatever you do, you're going to be confronted with other stories—stories that each year are illuminated, stories which nobody has ever heard of before. And it’s the scale of it which … there’s a reason why World War Two remains the most read and studied subject in human history, and it's because many, many tens of millions of people participated in systems that also resulted in the genocide—or at the very least paid lip service to a system that was taken advantage of by fascist leaders.

And the pendulum is swinging. The cycle is back. It took me a decade to finish The Requisitions, and I had already been studying the Nazi genocide for a decade, so I can't say I was surprised or have been surprised by what's happening in the world, particularly in the USA.

My dad fled Spain, a fascist country, and, lo and behold, I left the USA before it became fascist. But I would say that the writing was on the wall even in 2009/2010 … I could feel this splitting of humanity, this Us versus Them binary thinking. And it’s scary because when you feel like you are on the right side of history, there's only one thing to do with the other side of it, and that's what disturbed me most studying the Nazi genocide: the conviction (which is from the Latin term to convince someone of something), a desire to constantly convince others of one's righteousness. That's a scary thing.

SPOILER Q: The passing of time is an essential idea in The Requisitions . You say remembering is like stopping time, and when Viktor is being tortured, it’s vital for him that he knows what time it is.

That torture section is challenging to read (and was very hard to write). The chapter is based on a book by a Belgian author named Jean Améry, who survived torture by the Gestapo. He wrote a collection called At the Mind’s Limits about how to intellectualize—and is it even possible to intellectualize?—the nature of torture and brutality. If his entire life was to train to understand the mind and how to perceive existence, he wondered, could he use his intellect to better survive?

The jury’s out on that. Jean Améry ended up taking his own life (as did many other survivors, including the author Primo Levi), and of course, I don't know how one could make peace with such brutality. It was a challenge to write that section but also to put myself in a position of attempting to locate the possibility of hope in such a scenario. As far as whether or not there’s hope at the end of the book, I have my ideas. As Americans United Statesians, we believe in happy endings as an ideal; as a European, I prefer to think of them as a possibility.

Q: What do you think we’ve forgotten in 2025 that we must remember?

My knee-jerk reaction is reaching across the aisle (however you define that). I find this era is very fragmented because of technology, which connects us, like we're doing now, but which also confines us to our homes. Grocery deliveries mean you don't have to go to the store, which means you don't necessarily meet the grocer who might be very different than you.

I enjoy going to the bar and the terrace to meet people in Paris. Post-Covid, however, and especially in places where people have to drive everywhere, folks don't interact with each other like they used to. And the scariest thing for me is to recognize how many people voted for someone who is a self-described authoritarian, and [most people] don’t talk to anyone who voted for that guy, or vice versa. That, for me, is what’s scary. I don't know if it's an unwillingness, an inability, or part of the design of our society not to interact with folks who are not like us … but I know how historians and people who lived through fascist eras talk about them, and it is very rarely the most sadistic, monstrous types that are the problem—the cliché is the people who keep their head down and don't say anything.

It’s a hard thing to have a dialogue with people who don’t believe in the same kind of humanity we do—that is not easy—but that’s also the point the duty of being educated, and I have a suspicion that the conversations at the cafe or pub or grocery store immediately cut through that tension. Dialoguing face-to-face is very different than viewing the world through the key-hole of the Internet.

In times of spiritual disillusionment, we start distrusting each other because there's not a unifying thing to connect us, which leads to tribalism and … I mean, I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The shade of blue you wear can get you punched in the face. Which is a hilarious concept to me. “Duke Blue” versus “Carolina Blue” is a fundamental philosophical difference for some people—even in their sixties, their faces get red, you know, when they start talking about it, so you’ve got to reach across the aisle. Speak to the fans of your rival—that’s what I think we need to remember.

Q: What are your thoughts about the recent success of Squid Game ?

What's ironic about Squid Game is the show’s writer, Hwang Dong-hyuk, was a struggling screenwriter who ended up selling his computer upon which he’d written Squid Game to pay for expenses. Years later, Dong-hyuk became a millionaire when, lo and behold, his depiction of a hyper-capitalist country consumed by greed and power was finally picked up. Today, the show is a dystopian reference point for the entire globe.

Season 1 is a valuable commentary on the Zero-Sum nature of hyper-capitalist consumerist greed. I don't think capitalism is the problem; its implementation is, and Squid Game certainly raises those questions. We all want to win are told to want to win the Nobel Prize and be the best of everything and, reach the top of the pyramid and, have our own TV shows, become president of the USA … this is the same narrative we've been taught for decades—that we all should be at the very top of the pyramid—but the pyramid is the problem, I think. So here's to circles, not pyramids. And even Squid Game, as a success story, perpetuates the issue (do yourself a favor and avoid watching Season 2). We’ve all been sold bought into this myth that becoming rich and famous is the goal, so I'm not particularly shocked by what's happening in the USA … what surprises me most is that so many people still act surprised by the absurdities and cruelties happening worldwide.

Q: Yes. At one point, there’s a line in your book about how we shouldn’t be shocked by all the cruelty happening …

Yeah. And that’s part of why there are really cruel scenes in The Requisitions. We watch Squid Game and other films filled with extreme brutality, and then some people pretend to act shocked when they see a nipple on the television. So, while I understand the challenge of reading the torture scene, we also witness gore in Hollywood movies and just call it a movie … I think we're totally desensitized in some formats and remain shocked in others, but this is no longer something we can afford. The level of outrage has become really toxic … we’ve got to look at the cruelty in the face and confront it.

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Note about the audio recording: out of respect for privacy, I’ve removed the participants’ voices. The above written text is also slightly different than the audio recording, because I am my own PR team and something something creative license.