Prussian Blue (Bernie Gunther, #12)

by Philip Kerr

I love driving, but France is a big country and its endless roads hold no pleasure for me. Driving is fine if you’re alongside Grace Kelly and in possession of a nice blue convertible Jaguar on a picturesque mountain road with a picnic basket in the boot. But for most people, motoring in France is dull, and the only thing that stops it from being routine are the French, who are among the worst drivers in Europe. Not without some justification, we used to joke that there were more Frenchmen killed by bad motorists during the fall of France in the summer of 1940 – as the French desperately tried to escape the German advance – than there were by the Wehrmacht.

If you live long enough you realize that everything that happens to us is all the same illusion, the same shit, the same celestial joke. Things don’t really end, they just stop for a while and then they start up again, like a bad record. There are no new chapters in your book, there’s just the one long fairy story – the same stupid story we tell ourselves and which, mistakenly, we call life. Nothing is ever really over until we’re dead.

Sometimes being German seems to come with some serious disadvantages.