Anti-Climacus

An interesting review of a novel-like substance on the destruction of Lidice. Interesting to me both as someone who just finished teaching two courses that spent a fair amount of time talking about World War II, and also because Lidice features prominently in Javier Marías' Your Face Tomorrow.

A taste of the review:

The object of Binet’s contempt, it seems, is nothing less than the imagination itself. In his view, the imagination is a form of mediation—it brings close something that is far from us, giving us the illusion of witness and participation. But when it comes to a historical event, the need for such mediation is a reminder of our distance from the original, of the inauthenticity of our relation to the past. This paradox is why Holocaust fiction has always been such a morally contested subject: to imagine the suffering of the victims is both to assert our solidarity with them and to demonstrate that we are not actually among them.