Apres note: I'm coming back to this after a long hiatus, mostly associated with my laziness. There will be repetitions and errours. There will be repetitions and errors. Robert Harris' "Fatherland" is a counter-factual historical novel about an imagined future/past in which the Nazis won the Second World War. Philip K. Dick's "The Man in…
I was writing a bunch of posts about "Fatherland" and "The Man in the High Castle", but school intervened (teaching, not learning) and it got very busy for me. Now I've totally lost where I was with that, and I'm only getting back on track (not really). But it's been a year of this coronavirus,…
Two novels. Robert Harris' "Fatherland" and Phillip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle". As I've mentioned in previous posts, the novels, while sharing a setting (the 1960s in an alternative history in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War) could not be more different in terms of how they tell their respective…
And we're back. As the title says, this is the 5th post in a series. You can read all of the ones that have gone before, or you can read none of them. I'd prefer if you read all of them, multiple times, identified codes, themes , ideas, whatever, that I hadn't intended or noticed,…
Clickbaity title alert: My friend didn't rob the Tate Modern as in: rush in there with a gun, brandishing it around, and fleeing with half of Hirst's cow sculpture or a bunch of money. But he did steal from there. It's not a big thing, but it was kind of funny at the time, and…
Preambular Note: I didn't know what the German word for 4 was. I learned the words 1, 2, and 3 from the movie "Cool Runnings". Preambular Note (2): If you read what I post on WordPress, and if you're thoroughly sick of reading about "Fatherland", don't worry, I'm sick of writing about it. I initially…
Happy New Year to all who read this, except for those of you who believe that this thing that I'm writing (more than 3,000 words after this post) should be an instructional kind of thing. Because it's not. I don't know why I should have to say it, but it's because fascism shouldn't be normalised…
In my last post about the novel "Fatherland", I very briefly got into the weeds, so to speak, of the novel's characters and plot. For the purposes of this post, I've put on some gloves, grabbed a secateurs and a pitchfork, and I'm going to attempt to clear it out a bit. As I said,…
It's not really returning. I'd like to do a proper close reading of Dostoevsky's story that I based a meandering series of posts on, and whenever I finish Joseph Frank's biography, I think I will. Instead, what I want to do is draw attention to the very excellent jacobinmag.com, which is carrying an interview with…
Riddle: There is a man standing on a stage. He is a Nazi. 10 other people are listening to him talk. How many Nazis are in the room? Question: What bestselling alternate history novel featured a very young American journalist giving an SS Major, a character whom, according to the New York Times, represented the…
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