Customer Reviews

La Part De L Autre (Ldp Litterature) (French Edition)

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The archetypal story of following the life that was and the life that could have been gets a news twist in this exploration of what Hitler's life could have been if a slightly different turn had been taken at a critical juncture. Quite a daring (near suicidal) proposition for a writer, but Schmitt pulls it off, with a successful balancing act of fact and fiction. An introspection that leaves the reader wondering if there could be a little bit (or a lot) of Hitler in any human being, ready to be unleashed, triggered by an unfortunate event, just like a butterfly effect that can trigger a hurricane.

Note: The English version of this book (according to[...]) is "The Alternative Hypothesis (not found on Amazon.com).

It sounded as if it would be an interesting alternative history, showing what the world would have been like if Hitler had been accepted as an art student and become an artist instead of an evil dictator. However, I could not even get to the part where the alternative history was shown, I was so bored. The author felt obliged to concentrate on his imaginings about his alternate Hitler's sexual preoccupations for pages and pages and pages at the beginning--it wasn't exactly pornographic but sort of low-level smut that was extremely dull. Maybe the book took a turn for the better eventually but the author lost me completely.
To be fair, I have to say that the author is a skilled writer of French with an excellent writing style. If there had been some interesting content (or even, some actual content, besides Hitler avoiding his landlady and descending into smut but afraid to act on his obsessions), the book might have been a pleasure to read instead of a chore. As it is, it was like one of those books that you have assigned for reading in one of those college classes with a very avant-garde and 'advanced' type teacher, that win literary prizes based on style alone but have no plot, no action,no characterization worth speaking of and are mindnumbingly dull to everyone but students looking for subjects for esoteric doctoral theses. If I could have given it negative stars, I would have, it was THAT bad.