kk this book read me dead to rights. Takes place in the Fall of '56, with all the characters having endured Nazi Germany/Vichified France and the colonial fallout of post-WWII Europe/Africa.

Within the first few pages, after such poetic passages of the protagonist being tortured in police custody:

Fernand would have never believed that this was it, torture, the infamous question. The question which requires only one answer, the same, always the same: hand over your brothers. that it could be so excruciating. No, not the right word. Our alphabet is too decorous. Horror can't but give up before its twenty-six little characters.

I found myself disagreeing with the narrative direction. Like, "we're supposed to feel sympathy for a terrorist? (that's what people who bomb buildings are called)," but by the end of the book I've changed my position at least 51%.

The story does go on to address the "grey" area concerns about "under what sort of circumstances is it civically permissible/patriotic in fact" to bomb buildings. Crucially, no one was in the buildings, human violence was never the intent – which I think does matter.

About Algeria Hélène know only what is reported by the French press. That is, nothing, apart from the state's moralizing piffle.

I've been prevented. Increasingly, I found myself mapping the plight of the French Algerian nationals to that of American colonists (am I stupid that that's what I have to do to sympathize/justify anti-colonialism? Good for me but not for thee?)

There are 2.5 plot strings to follow:

• The A plot focusing on the failed bombing, subsequent torture, and imprisonment of Fernand
• The B plot describing he and Hélène's love story, his TB and their shared whimsy
• And the B.5 plot which discusses Henri

All three of these stories are equally engaging, and the transitions between each are both suspenseful and punch-packing such that it doesn't feel like a sawtooth pattern of excitement as you progress through the story. The A plot at first portrays Fernand to be a radical activist, and the B plot softens him, revealing him to be a gentleman –albeit not formally educated in the theory which he is willing to die for. Similarly, Hélène emerges as a bad ass bitch (complementary) of a wife who has his back throughout. She is devoted to his and his confederates' cause and labors to ensure that her husband remains presentable at trial.

Smadja stands, in tears, forehead against the wall.

The afterword has two damning notes worth summarizing here.

1. Fernand was the only European to have been executed during the Algerian war
2. Smadja (his lawyer) was arrested and interned at a suppression camp.

related