Category: Book Review

GoodReads meta-data is 362 pages, rated 3.81 by 997 litizens.

Genre: Autobiography.

Verdict:  ….ellipses…, indeed!

In a southeast corner of Bavaria is the small town (population 17,000 in 2018) of Sigmaringen, which had been the seat of the principality of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen until 1850, there is a castle befitting that status. The town has since remained the personal property of the Hohenzollern family. Fascinating, uh?  

In September 1944 the castle became home to the remnant of the Vichy government in exile, one of the more bizarre twists of fate in World War II.  More than a thousand people, including Maréchal Phillip Pétain, President of the council of the Vichy government and his prime minister, Fernand de Brinon were trucked out of Vichy and ensconced in and around that Hohenzollern Castle at Sigmaringen.  The others were Vichy loyalists, officials, army officers, clerks, ministers, telephonists, typists, janitors, archivists, aides, butlers, factotums, secretaries, churchmen, sycophants, diplomats, hangers-on, however, initially there were few of the French fascist zealots from Paris who were left to fend for themselves.  Along with the loyalists went their families and retainers. This castle would qualify as an Old Dark House with dungeons, hidden doors, spy holes, caves, secret passages, bricked up passage ways, concealed rooms, and the ghosts of Hohenzollerns past.  In residence was the last Hohenzollern princess who occasionally appeared from her private apartment.  

This crew was officially known as – get this – first as la Commission gouvernementale de Sigmaringen, which was changed a few days later to la Délégation gouvernementale française pour la défense des intérêts français en Allemagne, and then la Commission gouvernementale française pour la défense des intérêts nationaux. Even in 1944, even in extremis managers reorganise and rename to justify their existence, it would seem.  Whatever the nomenclature, it was the government in exile of Vichy France until April 1945.  By a personal order from Hitler, the Castle and its environs were designated a French enclave ruled by the aforementioned government in exile.  

Now why Hitler would bother with this lot is another question, perhaps for Indy Neidell one day.  Hitler had rescued Mussolini and set him up with a rump government at Salo, yes, true, but that made some sense in that the Salo government kept order in northern Italy behind German lines. The Sigmaringen government had nothing to order but itself for the seven months of its tenuous existence. One speculation is that the Vichy Government, house of cards though it was, was kept intact so that should the the tide of war change it could be quickly re-installed. Chalk that up to optimism.  

Neither Pétain nor Pierre Laval, for though deposed as prime minister the latter remained a power behind the throne, or so he thought, wanted to leave France, though what their fate would be if they remained requires no imagination, yet possibly both these men were so deluded they alone would have been surprised by the lynch mob.  The solution was to make the enclave French territory on the model of an embassy.  This German legal fiction was grudgingly accepted by the Vichy loyalists. Hence both Laval and Pétain could say they had not left French territory while in that castle in Germany.  Look up legal fiction for details. 

Meanwhile, some of those zealots who had fled from Paris joined the group.  This was not a homogeneous lot.  The zealots from Paris had long criticised the Vichy government for its sloth, incompetence, semitism, fashion sense, defeatism, and lack of commitment to the cause of fascism, failure to retain the French Empire, and poor grammar.  Parisien leaders of factions, cults, and publicists put themselves forward at this eleventh and dark hour as alternative governments to the Germans in this city-state of one thousand damned souls. These rivalries are partly reflected in the name changes noted above, as the splinter groups of a few dozen jockeyed for position. The Germans had no interest in rocking the already sinking boat and stuck with the Vichy comedy.

Among the number in the castle were the medical doctor and novelist Céline, Lucette, his wife, and Bébert, their cat, and later in 1957 desperate to make a living, he penned this screed about those dying days.  It consists of his well known ellipses in stream of consciousness. It seems to this reader it was published only because it had Céline’s name on it. After the war he had been judged a traitor and suffered national denigration for his collaboration. That denigration meant he was excluded from social services and even could not ride public transport.  To see a doctor, to buy a metro ticket in those days one had to show the carte d’identité, and his card was marked.  But he had been a celebrated novelist and his postwar notoriety, perhaps, added to the caché of the book, or so the publisher may have estimated.  

The Vichy French flag flew over the Castle, a newspaper of sorts was produced, a radio station was set up but seldom had enough electricity to broadcast, and some other accoutrements of a state, like – believe it or not – postage stamps were designed. The file clerks filed; the typists typed; the factotums factoted. There were also three foreign ambassadors in attendance, Italian, Japanese, and German. And it had its own army, a gang of the dreaded Milice. However, the aged Maréchal, who was well over eighty years old by this time, went into a sulk and refused to participate in this last charade.  

Food was scarce, aerial bombardment an ever-present threat, drinking water often contaminated, the German-uniformed (mostly Croat) guards were warders who made sure none of their charges left, and they, too, were anxious. The more desperate the circumstances the more the exiles turned on each other. Leading the way, Céline shrilly denouncing them all as Jews. 

News of the Christmas Nazi Ardennes offensive, rumours of Nazi secret weapons all gave hope to these desperate and despicable people, but the reality of no food, no paper, no wine, no soap, no fuel for heat, no hot water, no drugs, no clean bandages, no socks, no thread to mend ripped clothing, no nothing was crushing.   

As Free French forces approached, Pétain and Laval and few others in their retinue fled into Switzerland.  (Some sources say the French Free army was slowed to allow the inmates to escape as the Free French had no desire to deal with them.)  Once in Switzerland Pétain demanded that he be returned to France and he was, while Laval demanded asylum in Switzerland which was denied and he, too, was returned to France. Meanwhile back at the castle the German-Croat guards disappeared as the Free French rolled in and bagged the remainder, though in the confusion a few individuals escaped to Italy. 

The book is sprinkled with hindsight and it was all written well after the fact. Céline did not keep a diary, though he did practice medicine among the exiles and kept notes for that.  

It is a story reminiscent of that other, smaller castle crew at Château Itter (Austria) where from 1940 the Germans held as hostages to fortune French officials of the Third Republic. Among them were former prime ministers Éduoard Daladier, who had sat in a numb silence at Munich, and Paul Reynaud, who in 1940 had wanted to continue the fight from Algeria, former Vichy cabinet minister Jean Borotera who resisted Vichy’s anti-semitism, and Generals Maurice Gamelin and Maxime Weygand, along with politicians Andre François-Poncet, Michel Clemenceau, and Albert Lebrun, as well as one of Charles de Gaulle’s sisters, and a few others totalling perhaps thirty. LeBrun had been the President of the Senate who had authorised Pétain to sound out the Germans about terms and was then surprised when Pétain used the commission to surrender without attempting negotiation.    

There would have been no love lost among these people.  Gamelin and Weygand were each at work on memoirs blaming the other for the Defeat, as were Daladier and Reynaud. Léon Blum, another one-time prime minister was not here, because Vichy officials had in mind a show trial to blame him for anything and everything, and kept him apart.  The Itter was liberated in late 1944.  

But let’s not forget that the most significant hostages to fortune that the Nazis had, namely, a million plus French prisoners of war, working as slave labor in German war industries and on farms.  In addition to these unfortunates, there were also as many as another million French citizens sent to Germany as forced labor by the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). The Vichy Regime made little effort to secure the release of the POWs or to stymie the STO.  Indeed, as to the latter, sometimes it sent more conscripts than ordered by the Nazis to show how enthusiastic it was. In addition the production of millions of others in France was harvested and sent to Germany. 

N.B. In 1941 the Vichy Regime did try to negotiate a return of prisoners by offering German unlimited access to Syria and Lebanon. This was attractive to Germany as a threat both to the Suez Canal and the Iraq oil fields.  It took the Allied conquest of the Levant (in which Australians participated) to block that move. NSW Governor Roden Cutler had his leg shot off there.  

GoodReads meta-data is 248 pages, rated 3.96 by 8432 litizens.   

Verdict: Nada, nil, zilch, zip, nada, goose egg,…. 

This is a book about nothing and how important it is.  Get that, and get it straight!  Lear was right about nothing. Something times nothing is nothing.  See?  Yet nothing is always with us.  

Babylonians with their sixty-based number system counted with abaci and started to use a space holder(s) to distinguish 1 on the first line from 10 on the second from 100 on the third, etc. They used slashes (/) to indicate the next line so 1 is 1, 1/ is 10, 1// is 100/,etc.  Thus, like the numbers, zero came from the East to the West, and some of that passage was vexed.  

Arabic numbers, derived from India, combined with zero (0) are much more efficient and effective than Roman numerals.  Ever tried multiplying Roman numerals? Long division? Even writing them down shows that: Arabic 678 is Roman DCLXXVIII.  And because there are fewer characters the margin of error in transcription is reduced.  Plus the Arabic numbers are more distinctive one from another than the numerals with fewer inscription errors.  

But nothing, zero, has metaphysical and mystical connotations that disturbed many.  The Pythagoreans regarded it as a sign of the beast or hit-and-run and tried to keep it locked up.  To some zero represented both nothing and everything.  Both ends of that continuum were threatening.  If there was nothing, where was it? Could nothing be anywhere?  

On the other hand, it represent infinity, everything, say in Zeno’s paradox about going half-way to a goal ad infinitum and never getting there.  Once infinity is considered, well, there is a lot of that to think about and our place in it must be pretty small.  

When we are born are we one-year old?  No when were are born we are zero-years old and twelve months later we are one year old.  Everyone, even Republicans, well, maybe, knows that.  But…., what about the calendar?  There was no year zero there: 1 BC and 1 AD are adjacent with no intervening zero, which is one of the many reasons why the calendars of different civilisations vary as they do.  

Zero became a number in India.  When 2, a number, is subtracted from 2, a number, the result is 0 which, being the product of two numbers zero must itself be a number.  Indian mathematicians accepted this logical result sooner and more easily than those to the West who resisted this obvious conclusion with some Olympian mathletics for nearly two millennia.   

When zero (0) was a placeholder as in the Babylonian system it was put to the right of the numbers 1, 2, 3, ….9, and 0.  But when it was promoted to a number it becomes the base 0, 1, 2, 3, …9.  Ah, but that is counterintuitive.  We do not count apples starting with 0 and then 1, and 2.  We have three apples but only count up to 2 if we do, and we don’t (do that). So it went back to the right side of the sequence where it is on keyboards today.  Although in England and Australia the ground floor of a building is in effect zero (0) and the second level is the first floor.  Go figure.  I still stumble over this fact. 

The Indians were so phlegmatic that they also accepted negative numbers. When 3 is subtracted from 2 the result is -1.  This conclusion was resisted to the last ditch in the West even to René Descartes’s day and age.  In his determination to resist the negative, Descartes denigrated such numbers, e.g., the square root of negative number, as imaginary.  See the Wikipedia entry for more mist and fog on the topic. 

What a change since then.  Nowadays everyone brags about Zero Tolerance. 

The vanishing point in art also gets a look in.  (Get it?)  Leonardo was just one artist who saw mathematics in painting perspective.  So does the elliptical orbit of planets from Johannas Kepler.  Wide ranging indeed.  

Then along came set theory, thermodynamics, string theory, a Cepheid variable, the Kelvin scale, the Casimir effect, cosmic Doppler shift, Mack the Knife, the Golden Ratio, and even rational numbers.  For nothing zero has stirred up a lot somethings. Even the Black Hole comes into the equation. Is nothing sacred?  Zero is everywhere and everything!

The book considers everyday examples like the Year Zero above, but also  abstruse mathematics (e.g., projective geometry) , and even more abstruse metaphysics (infinity, as above) that I found it tough going, but, being tough, I kept going. 

All in all, the book is Much Ado about Nothing.  (Yuk, yuk.)  But surely Jean-Paul gets the last words with his Being and Nothingness.  For the the fraternity brothers, let me explain:  zero is something, so it has being; zero is nothing, so it has nothingness. Sartre could have called his book Zero and been done with it. (Maybe he feared a shelver would get it mixed up with Zorro.)

But wait there is more, the book ends with an appendix in which it is proven that Winston Churchill was a carrot. See for yourself…., if you dare. 

In the Temple of the Muses (1992) of John Robert Maddox’s diverting SPQR series the protagonist Decius encountered an Egyptian mathematician, a woman, who is onto zero and spends all of her time, according to the jaded Decius, talking about nothing when there is much else they could do together that would be something.    

GoodReads meta-data is 374 pages, rated 3.92 by 2710 litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Whoosh!

It had to happen! McKinsey management has made it to the afterlife, and there, after a 360-degree review accompanied by all the mod clichés of corporate-speak, Satan’s performance has been found unsatisfactory. St Peter has mined the data on his computer tablet and there is no denying the optics of the spreadsheets: things in Hell are bad, but no thanks to Satan. Well, things are so bad many condemned souls cannot even get into Hell so long are the poorly managed entrance lines, but must abandon even that hope. Yet that is one of Satan’s core competencies.    

His KPIs are no longer scalable, indeed, they are no longer visible. No amount of thinking outside the box, colouring outside the lines, corporate values, empowerment, leverage, over the wall(ness), bench-marking, peeling the onion, breaking down the silos, pushing the envelope, increasing the bandwidth, paradigm shifting, data-driving, closing the loop, low-hanging fruit, return on investment, SWOTing, or reaching out can take Hell down to the next level.  When asked if his management of Hell represents best practice, well, what is Satan to say?  Who’s is better?  

After the usual collegial backbiting, some of it literal, Satan appeals this decision because St Peter is sending too many souls to Hell for parking in disabled zones, DVD copying, nose picking, unreturned library books, and the like. But the review committee to hear his appeal, packed with angels unlikely to be sympathetic with the Lord of Darkness, is implacable: Satan is being out-placed.  G-o-n-e.

He is condemned to live on earth as an earthling!  This is, indeed, for him a fate worse than death. Hell is certainly other people, vide Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. 

And where is he sent as an alternative to Hell? Birmingham England that is where. A place, it seems, where there is no respect for evil incarnate, and it is forever cold and wet.  

There he adjusts slowly to the new circumstances, and seeks out Satanists to worship himself, but finds them useless poseurs who have never pitch-forked writhing souls into the Lake of Eternal Fire. He’s got nothing to learn from them. Then by chance he finds his métier in Heavy Metal music and for a time is a sin-sation.  But even that grows boring: shouting damnation at dunderheads who pay for the privilege is  fun and profitable but the amusement wanes.  That low boredom threshold may have been his problem in managing Hell.   

In an effort to fit in with his new neighbours Satan prepares a dinner party, like nothing anyone has ever had before.  (Did I mention that he had a part-time job – more of a hobby to remind him of the old days – at a mortuary?)  Then there was the flamethrower, he does like fire, for the crème brulée.  It did not end well.  

In time he discovers his dismissal was rigged in a management coup and finds unlikely allies (including Jeanne d’Arc) to put things back to rights, er, well, wrongs.  

It is a cackle and since there is a murder (followed by a resurrection) it is classified as a krimi above. Well, two of each to be technical. 

When we were planning a trip to Birmingham I found a few novels set in Britain’s second largest city, this among them.  Though that trip was cancelled, by then I had the book sample on the Kindle and when I started reading it, there was no stopping.  It is the first title in a series and I have already finished the second which has more twists and turns than a dean at a budget meeting and started the third in which eternally young and bored Jeanne goes on an away mission.  In the fourth, yes I have read that one, too, we learn where work-weary demons go for a quiet life.  And I am now up to volume seven, ah hmm, eight.  

GoodReads meta-data is 110 pages, rated 3.96 by 324 litizens. 

Genre: Biography (sort of).

Verdict: Wash your hands and fasten your seatbelts.  

Hands up if you know Semmelweis (1818–1865)! He is the man who explained why we should wash our hands. His assiduous research into morbidly rates in maternity hospitals in Vienna led him to the conclusion that infections were transmitted by the hands of the doctors from one patient to another. From that finding he advocated hand washing and more hand washing.  On that subject more in a minute, but first a few words about the book.

The Life and Works of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was an eighty-page thesis submitted to meet the requirements of the medical degree Céline earned.  But there is nothing thesis-like about it. An indication of its tone and style hits the reader in the first lines: ‘Mirabeau howled so loudly that Versailles was frightened.  Not since the Fall of the Roman Empire had such a tempest come crashing down upon men…. ‘   This opening passage goes on the characterise the French Revolution as a carnival of blood.  Only three chapters later does Semmelweis appear, well, first his mother appears.   

To return to the story, for that hand-washing advocacy Semmelweis was shunned, ridiculed, demoted, demonised, exiled, and finally driven mad; in the latter state he took his own life by the very infection he had identified.  

Members of the obstetrics profession had long been resigned to high mortality in pregnant women, and accepted it. According to this upstart Semmelweis, doctors themselves caused these deaths!  Ridiculous! Moreover, hand washing was undignified! Hmmph!

The fact that women who gave birth at home, or even on the street, had lower death rates than those who gave birth in all modern-conveniences maternity hospitals was written off as false news.    

John Stuart Mill once opined that if the laws of geometry annoyed Republicans they would immediately declare them false.  (He may not have mentioned Republicans but I got the hint.)  Semmelweis’s intrusion upset a very elaborate and complacent medical establishment and the reaction was to shoot, stab, garrotte, strangle, quarter, and bludgeon the messenger. 

In Paris, Prague, Berlin, and London as well as Vienna the medical profession united against this tiresome interloper and his pages and pages of data.  In truth he was an easy man to reject, being rude and crude; he was quite unwilling to proceed by half-measures.  It was all or nothing for him with the result that it was nothing.  On more that one occasion he barged in the office of a hospital director and berated him about hand washing.  Likewise he burst into wards when doctors were doing the rounds and berated them in front of patients and students. The Austrian emperor at one point exiled him because of these disruptive antics.  

N.B. Semmelweis worked from aggregate data and there is nary a mention of a microscope observing little critters. That came later. What he had was a mass of data that showed a correlation between no hand washing and death.  Reason and evidence are feeble assailants of the fortress of conventional wisdom and it took forty years for Semmelweis to be vindicated, and countless thousands of maternal deaths that soap and water would have prevented.   

All of the above can be gleaned from the Wikipedia entry.  And it bears little resemblance to the book at hand by one of the most remarkable figures in French literature:  Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894-1961) who used the nom de plume Céline. He was invalided out of the Army in 1915 with a wound at Ypres.  Later he took a job with the League of Nations in Francophone Africa where he travelled extensively.  Upon returning to France he trained as medical doctor and laboured in the working class districts of Paris where he was seldom paid.  At the time he was a rabid communist only later to because an equally rabid fascist (and energetic anti-Semite) during the war years.  He could be as rude and crude as Semmelweis.  

His most famous novel was Journey to the End of Night (1932) about his observations in Africa, followed by Death on Credit (1936) about working class life and death in the slums of Paris.  He wrote in the argot of the people he chronicled and not the stylised prose of the Academy and was thus reviled by the literary establishment for generations. These establishment gatekeepers are now gone and forgotten, while Céline is still in print.   

Declaration of interest:  One of the first reading assignments I had in graduate school concerned Semmelweis and his empirical data.  That is all I can remember but the name stuck because of the association with hand washing.