Hitler Mussolini and Me Charles Davis 9781579624323 Books
Download As PDF : Hitler Mussolini and Me Charles Davis 9781579624323 Books
1938, Hitler visits Italy. An expatriate Irish art historian is obliged to guide Mussolini and his guest round the galleries. Half fascinated, half repelled, he watches the tyrants, wrestling with the uneasy conviction that he ought to use the opportunity to 'do something' about them yet lacking the zeal that might transform misgivings into action.
Thirty years later, his daughter comes across a compromising clipping showing her father with the dictators. Exposed as a collaborator, the narrator explains what happened, what he did and did not do, and why, revealing in the process the part the girl's mother played in promoting the digestive disorders that were to influence the course of the war.
To help his daughter understand, he conjures a time before the crime that would define the century, a time before these men became monsters inflated to fit that crime, showing her the tawdry little people behind the myths, the real Hitler and Mussolini, The Flatulent Windbag and The Constipated Prick.
Based on historical events and using the tyrants' own words, Hitler, Mussolini, and Me brings the dictators down to earth, describing the murkier, more scurrilous aspects of their careers, and using jokes and scatology to weave a crazed pathway toward a cracked kind of morality. It is the story of an ordinary man living in extraordinary times, times when being ordinary was an act of rebellion in itself.
Hitler Mussolini and Me Charles Davis 9781579624323 Books
— Marx said that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce. It's not true. History repeats itself, but the tragedy and farce are contiguous at all times and in most things. It's just a question of what you choose to accentuate.And the narrator of Charles Davis's short, scurrilous, but informative novel about Hitler and Mussolini chooses to accentuate the farce. It is easier in his case, as the year is 1938, before the full monstrosity of the two Fascist leaders has been unleashed upon the world. In that year, the Führer and most of the Nazi hierarchy paid a week-long state visit to the Duce, touring artistic monuments when they were not planning world domination. The narrator, a bilingual historian with an Irish father and German mother, now working in a museum in Rome, is delegated as guide-interpreter. Hitler takes a fancy to him, not so much for his depth of knowledge (half of which he makes up anyway) as for his ability to listen to the incessant Führermonologs without seeming too sycophantic.
The events are taken from the memoirs of the real guide on that occasion, an Italian historian named Ranuccio Bandinelli. But the treatment is absolutely Davis's own. The year is now 1968. The narrator's daughter has come across a photo of her father with the two leaders; he writes to alleviate her shock. We learn early on that although the narrator would be hailed as "the man who saved Hitler and Mussolini," he would also hold his own counsel and prove his anti-Fascist credentials in his own way. These invented incidents come at the very end of the short novel, together with the story of how the narrator met his future wife. My main criticism is that the plot is too slight a skeleton to support the combination of factoids, historical musing, and sheer ribaldry that makes up most of the book.
It is indeed funny, but with that particularly British lavatorial humor that wears thin after a while. Mussolini is referred to as The Constipated Prick throughout, and Hitler as The Flatulent Windbag. The plot indeed turns on the frequency and odor of the Führer's farts (apparently a documented fact, though more so at a later date), and there is a climactic scene in a stalled elevator—well, you get the picture. Taking Moby-Dick as an example, Davis interleaves his actual story, told in chapters headed "Postcard from the Past," with others called "Cetology" in which he riffs on a particular topic, ranging from compendia of equally offensive anti-Nazi and anti-Semitic jokes to truly informative asides on Hitler's family history, his abilities as an artist, or Mussolini's own rise to power.
I received my copy of the book direct from the publishers. I very much enjoyed Charles Davis's earlier novel, STANDING AT THE CROSSROADS, which has an African setting, and also his WALK ON, BRIGHT BOY, which takes place in Inquisition Spain. But this is a new departure for him, appealing perhaps to a different kind of reader. I tend not to respond well to sustained comic writing, but this is just a matter of personal taste. All the same, I found much of interest in the book, especially as it catches the two dictators before the apocalypse of Holocaust and World War. And I recognize that, for all his humor, Davis's intention is basically serious:
— Appearances notwithstanding, my purpose here is not purely frivolous. […] It is apt that the word "écrire" incorporates both "rire" and "cri", because writing is often a bark of laughter veiling a howl of despair. And I can assure you, all that scatology, no matter how coarse, conveys a kind of cracked morality. By treating him as The Flatulent Windbag, I am bringing Hitler down to earth. But in doing so, I do not aim to make him less terrible. […] On the contrary, that is when he is most frightening, when he is on earth, a human being. Real people are far more terrifying than bogeymen and monsters because we cannot pretend they are something "other." They are people, like us. Worse, we might be one of them.
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Hitler Mussolini and Me Charles Davis 9781579624323 Books Reviews
I can’t be sure, but I believe it began in 1940, with Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Mel Brooks, The Producers, once again held Hitler and his regime up to ridicule. More recently, Look Who’s Back, the best-selling German novel, offers Adolf as a deluded, disoriented Rip Van Winkle figure coming back to life in modern-day Germany. The latter work is essentially a one-joke take on contemporary Germany, as well as the cult of celebrity. The Hitler portrayed in all these works, as well as in such things as the off-the-wall Monty Python’s Mr. Hilter and the Minehead by-election sketch ([...]), is essentially a music-hall comedy turn, literally so in The Producers. This is not the case in Charles Davis’s most recent novel. Hitler, together with his Italian buddy, are pictured during an actual get together they held in Rome in 1938. Furthermore, most of the dialogue is authentic, taken from their own pompous pronouncements. The comedy, of which there is plenty, is provided by the narrator, an Irish multilingual faux art historian roped into playing guide for the visit. He dubs Hitler as The Flatulent Windbag and Il Duce as The Constipated Prick. They are portrayed as ridiculous, menacing and, most disturbingly, all too human.
“There are two tools for coping with tyrants, demonization and derision. We can't admit they are like us. So we play their game, reducing people to caricatures, making them super-monstrous or super-ridiculous. Mussolini helps when it comes to derision. He wasn't an idiot, but he did a very good impersonation of one. Hitler is trickier. You have to strip away the carapace of metaphysical evil that has accrued around his person. But if you can manage it, what you are left with is a little man who farted a lot. And when you've got that, you have something human, something that can be encompassed.”
Colgan is writing a memoire to explain himself to his daughter, furious after finding an old newspaper clipping of her father pictured with the two dictators. It reads as a mesmerising stand-up routine. It is worth listening to the brilliant Audible version, if only the free sample, which has found the perfect Irish voice to bring it all to life. Once the narrator’s voice gets in your head, it is difficult to get off Davis’s informed, intelligent and witty ride. However, you will not want to get off in any case. This is a far more enjoyable, insightful and accomplished novel than the popular, albeit rather heavy-handed, plodding Look Who’s Back.
Since reading his wonderful first novel, Walk on Bright Boy (2007), I have been a great fan of Charles Davis’s work. He never fails to dazzle the reader with his sharp intelligence, wit and elegant writing. Hopefully, this novel will have the success that it and its author deserves and thereby encourage readers to discover his other novels.
Finally, it is well worth having a look at the novel’s Facebook page - [...], where, as a taster, Davis provides the first ten pages of the book.
— Marx said that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce. It's not true. History repeats itself, but the tragedy and farce are contiguous at all times and in most things. It's just a question of what you choose to accentuate.
And the narrator of Charles Davis's short, scurrilous, but informative novel about Hitler and Mussolini chooses to accentuate the farce. It is easier in his case, as the year is 1938, before the full monstrosity of the two Fascist leaders has been unleashed upon the world. In that year, the Führer and most of the Nazi hierarchy paid a week-long state visit to the Duce, touring artistic monuments when they were not planning world domination. The narrator, a bilingual historian with an Irish father and German mother, now working in a museum in Rome, is delegated as guide-interpreter. Hitler takes a fancy to him, not so much for his depth of knowledge (half of which he makes up anyway) as for his ability to listen to the incessant Führermonologs without seeming too sycophantic.
The events are taken from the memoirs of the real guide on that occasion, an Italian historian named Ranuccio Bandinelli. But the treatment is absolutely Davis's own. The year is now 1968. The narrator's daughter has come across a photo of her father with the two leaders; he writes to alleviate her shock. We learn early on that although the narrator would be hailed as "the man who saved Hitler and Mussolini," he would also hold his own counsel and prove his anti-Fascist credentials in his own way. These invented incidents come at the very end of the short novel, together with the story of how the narrator met his future wife. My main criticism is that the plot is too slight a skeleton to support the combination of factoids, historical musing, and sheer ribaldry that makes up most of the book.
It is indeed funny, but with that particularly British lavatorial humor that wears thin after a while. Mussolini is referred to as The Constipated Prick throughout, and Hitler as The Flatulent Windbag. The plot indeed turns on the frequency and odor of the Führer's farts (apparently a documented fact, though more so at a later date), and there is a climactic scene in a stalled elevator—well, you get the picture. Taking Moby-Dick as an example, Davis interleaves his actual story, told in chapters headed "Postcard from the Past," with others called "Cetology" in which he riffs on a particular topic, ranging from compendia of equally offensive anti-Nazi and anti-Semitic jokes to truly informative asides on Hitler's family history, his abilities as an artist, or Mussolini's own rise to power.
I received my copy of the book direct from the publishers. I very much enjoyed Charles Davis's earlier novel, STANDING AT THE CROSSROADS, which has an African setting, and also his WALK ON, BRIGHT BOY, which takes place in Inquisition Spain. But this is a new departure for him, appealing perhaps to a different kind of reader. I tend not to respond well to sustained comic writing, but this is just a matter of personal taste. All the same, I found much of interest in the book, especially as it catches the two dictators before the apocalypse of Holocaust and World War. And I recognize that, for all his humor, Davis's intention is basically serious
— Appearances notwithstanding, my purpose here is not purely frivolous. […] It is apt that the word "écrire" incorporates both "rire" and "cri", because writing is often a bark of laughter veiling a howl of despair. And I can assure you, all that scatology, no matter how coarse, conveys a kind of cracked morality. By treating him as The Flatulent Windbag, I am bringing Hitler down to earth. But in doing so, I do not aim to make him less terrible. […] On the contrary, that is when he is most frightening, when he is on earth, a human being. Real people are far more terrifying than bogeymen and monsters because we cannot pretend they are something "other." They are people, like us. Worse, we might be one of them.
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