The Requisitions
By Samuel Lopez- Barrantes
Chapter 4 Page 63
Identity

||:: “She's going to be fine,” The head surgeon reassured him.
“You've done everything you can, Doctor. Bauman. She is in good hands. There's a clinic we are working with in Portugal. She'll be treated there. And not to worry : we're only concerned with the prefrontal lobe.”
What terrifies Viktor most to this day is, in that moment, he actually believed them. But what else could he have done? He'd already tried insulin injections in Paris and a combination or malaria therapy and barbiturates in Brussels. After that he placed his faith in the science of an ice pick and a scooper. Barbarity in the name of love.
A fate worse than death. ::||

We follow Victor, a professor, or he used to be, as he attempts to make sense of The Nazi's movements, plans, and mindset. He searches for their reasoning behind the barbaric treatment of his fellow kin and still in the end refuses to believe that humankind can't end this way, with evil latched on to those, who find themselves in the position of such power.

As we learn Victor's story, we are also taken on a journey with the author as he masters his family jigsaw with his love of history and understanding of those who have been through it.

This composition of facts, a little fiction, and a whole lot of bravery, has been one of the most compelling reads I have come across. Victor is there in my minds eye, his belief in once more tasting freedom and the light of his kindness shining through him, catapulting him to a higher standard.

Why was the Nazi's able to follow Hitler so blindly? And without little details as to why?
The series of events may or may not have happened, but it's such a fantastic read. Highly recommend for anyone, researching or interested in an entirely different approach to the men and women, who was only to happy to wear their masks of evil, with little to no sway needed.
And the poor souls, whose only crime was to breathe.

Thank you so much to Samuèl Lopez-Barrantes, Kingdom Anywhere Publishing and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and relay my honest feedback

The only word that came to mind after finishing this one is Wow! This one stuck with me long after reading. It was heartbreaking and haunting but such a good read at the same time. It deals with WWII and that horrible time period. I highly recommend this book because it was so well done.

Thank you Net Galley ARC

This is about the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, WWII. Such a touching and heartbreaking story. It will stay with you for a long time.

Acquaintances over the years have thought I was putting them on when I told them about a famous – or perhaps I should say infamous – psychology experiment in the 1960s in which experimenters were surprised by how willing their subjects were to
go along with the experimenters’ instruction to administer what the subjects thought were ever-greater electric shocks to people in another room in an experiment supposedly about learning but actually about dominance, with experimenters expecting to encounter at least some resistance but instead getting near-total compliance. So willing, indeed, were the uninformed subjects to go along with what the experimenters asked of them, so ready to acquiesce to what they saw as responsible authority, that just the slightest nod of official encouragement could get them to administer levels of shocks so severe that, according to the instructor of the psychology course in which I first learned of the experiment, the people supposedly being shocked in the other room would be pounding on the other side of the wall begging for the shocks to stop.
Hard to believe, as I say, and not just the near-total compliance shown by the subjects, but also, especially when viewed through the lens of our socially conscious or “woke” times, that such an experiment could have been mounted at all, given the serious ethical considerations it raised – how would you like to go through life knowing you’d proven yourself a willing torturer.
But the experiment got at the abiding question of the years immediately following the Holocaust – what sorts of people could perpetrate the sorts of atrocities committed in the camps. And the uncomfortable answer, it seemed from the experiment, was a whole lot more people than you might think, a finding that was corroborated by a couple of other such later experiments, including one in which schoolchildren with blue eyes were told they were superior to kids with brown eyes and the blue-eyed kids lorded it over the brown-eyed kids with great relish, or another experiment in which subjects were divided into guards and inmates and, again, the guards showed no hesitancy in lording it over the inmates.
All of which is very much germane to Samuel Lopez-Barrantes’ “The Requisitions,” a metafiction in the vein of Julian Barnes or Salman Rushdie or Joan Didion (all of whom are cited in the novel) in which all three experiments are cited and which, for all its seemingly compelling story of three characters caught up in the Holocaust and the Lodz ghetto, nevertheless faces the difficulty inherent in all metafiction – how a reader can be expected to care about a book’s characters if they're told from the get-go, as they are in Lopez-Barrantes’ novel, that the characters are all figments of the author’s or main character’s imagination.
It’s something, of course, that’s true of all fiction by its very definition, that the characters or situations aren't real, with the difference being that in regular fiction the absence of any authorial intrusion can have a reader believing at least for a time that the characters actually are real, whereas in metafiction all such pretense of actuality is abandoned. So complete, indeed, is the dropping of the pretense of actuality that it gets at the very heart of what fiction is, whether it’s, in Graham Greene’s parlance, an “entertainment,” something to be enjoyed solely for its story line, or something more probing or philosophical in the way of, say, Rachel Cusk, of whom it’s been said that not just plot but characters have been jettisoned.
Not that characters in metafiction can’t be presented as fully rounded – a big part of Barnes’ accomplishment, for all his fictional playfulness, is his ability to still make you care about his characters, something that Lopez-Barrantes would have you feel for his characters as well, with how he so meticulously details the credentials of his main-character professor or how he particularizes the horrificness of the situations that engulf him and the other two main characters, a young woman and her conflicted German soldier.
But are they enough, amid the metafictional scaffolding, to truly engage a reader and have him turning pages?
It’s a question, obviously, to be decided by individual readers – personally, I found the metafictional aspect loosely enough integrated that it pretty well drops out completely during the last third of the novel – but however successful or not you find it, it’s not as put-offingly employed as with other metafictional authors, and along the way you’ll learn much that you might not have known about the Lodz ghetto in particular and the second World War in general – for instance, that in Lodz, the prewar Jewish population was almost 200,000 but by the end of the war was fewer than 10,000; and, about the war in general, that the usually given date of Sept. 1, 1939, for the war’s beginning, with Germany’s invasion of Poland, was preceded by German efforts to suggest provocation. Or as Lopez-Barrantes’ professor puts it, history in the end is the study of our own deception.

Wow! The Requisitions was definitely an enthralling story, and it had me thinking of the characters even after I put the book down.

The writing is intelligent, interesting, and sometimes grotesque. I could do without the “he squished his penis back into his pants” visual that was repeated at least three times, but other than that it was enjoyable.

I have yet to read a WWII book like this so it was definitely unique. I didn’t love the ending after he got me hooked on the characters, I’m left wondering what remains in the end.

Thank you Net Galley and Kingdom Anywhere Publishing for allowing me to read this book.