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HHhH - Read Along Comments for Part 2 (April 2013)
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Daniel
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rated it 4 stars
Apr 01, 2013 04:20AM
This is for general impressions and comments about Part 2. Spoilers allowed.
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Well, I finished it. I kind of didn't want it to end. It was quite strange, I knew how it all turned out and so there wasn't that wanting to rush to get to the end.I very much enjoyed where he chose to end it, as perhaps a final comment on those quirks of fate. On such meetings are lives decided.
I really felt, as well, his comments about it giving him no pleasure to write the scene where they died. Knowing the amount of time he spent researching this book, his 'for what?' comment was very powerful. He can't save them, can't change anything, can barely even do them justice, and cannot do everyone justice... unless he seizes the power a made-from-whole-cloth novelist has, but then he is no longer telling their story.
Terry wrote: "I really felt, as well, his comments about it giving him no pleasure to write the scene where they died. "I know just what you mean. As 'for what?' To tell people like me what happened is one response. Unless I'd read this book I would never have known...
In another thread, people were discussing the shifts in tense. What struck me most, in part II was the frequent shifts to first person.In the long chapter following the assassination attempt, for example, we have just heard how "Gabcik aims and fires -- and Klein collapses, hit in the leg." Then, at the end of the same paragraph, "Hurrying to the other side of the crossroads, he runs down toward the river. And I, limping thorugh the streets of Prague, dragging my leg and I climb back up Na Porici, watch him run into the distance."
The narrator moves into the first person a few different times -- usually one of the Anthropoid plotters -- but this is the only place I saw him embodying a "bad guy." Why would he place himself in the person of Klein, the shot Nazi chauffer?
I saw it as trying to place himself inside the characters he's writing about, reminding us that this is how he is imagining it to have happened rather that a historical truth. Great example, by the way.
