This is not a synopsis about a novel about WWII

historical metafiction 27-years in the making

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I’m back in my childhood home in Chapel Hill, NC, enjoying Christmas Festivus with my twin brother

Aaron Lopez Barrantes

and my mom.

We’re here to celebrate, but we’re also here to sort through discard almost everything in our childhood home before putting the house up for sale next year.

My brother and I left North Carolina in 2010, but remnants of the past still linger everywhere: Michael Jordan memorabilia and Rugrats toys and hundreds of books from my youth, which means I’m doing frequent trips to the community center and used book store to help my mother move out move on.¹

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The opening scene in my latest novel, The Requisitions, is eerily similar to my current situation.

Last week, I told you about how my wife

Augusta Sagnelli

and I created our own imprint so we could publish independently (read the query letter to literary agents my Substack community here).

In brief, The Requisitions is a historical historiographic fiction metafiction² about the Nazi Occupation of Poland and the peculiar human tendency to be unwilling to learn from the past.

And now, picture a real-life version of my thirty-five year old self, sitting criss-cross applesauce on my childhood bedroom floor, choosing which of my dozens of books about WWII to keep.

Here’s the selection, which holds the key to The Requisitions:

This is how The Requisitions starts:

When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café.

and a few lines later:

The Astoria Café really did exist. It was a haven for artists and thinkers during the 1930s in the otherwise industrial town of Łódź, Poland. My mother often told me the story of how my obsession with this history began: I was an eight-year-old boy, no taller than a fire hydrant, when I first looked up at the bookshelf. It was tall and white, and it lorded over wooden cabinets that my mother filled with trinkets and old toys. As the story goes, I climbed onto the cabinets and stood on my tiptoes to reach the bookshelf, pulling down a thick black book with red ink scrawled on the spine, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

From that moment onwards, I became obsessed.

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The word obsession comes from the Latin word obsessio (a blockade, a siege), but the Latin verb obsedeō has an even deeper significance: ob, “opposite,” and sedeō, “I sit.” In other words, the person consumed by obsession cannot rest; they are incapable of keeping the forces of obsession at bay until they either conquer their obsession or are conquered by it.

But I should’ve known better than to think conquering my obsession with WWII was as easy as writing a novel. Indeed, it took rewriting the entire book multiple times and now returning to where it all began—to the primary source—to realize I’ve been fundamentally mistaken about that little eight year old version of myself all along.

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It often seems to come back to Joan Didion for me:

Imposing narrative lines. Disparate images. Shifting phantasmagoria. Actual experience.

Yes.

Twenty-seven years onwards, the boy who pulled down The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich finds the very same tattered book on the very same bookshelf and realizes he’s been mis-remembering the title.

You might ask if it really matters. You might ask what it changes. The difference seems small, but it isn’t insignificant, not to me.

The actual title of the book that sparked my obsession with WWII is The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich Adolf Hitler. Here’s proof:

My brain is already racing to find an explanation (I’m a novelist, after all).

How could I misremember something as fundamental as a book title

whilst constructing an entire novel around that memory?

Should I change that detail in subsequent editions (171/300 copies remain).

Or maybe this explains why my interest in WWII and specifically Holocaust studies has always been less about military history or geopolitics than in how individuals find meaning in tragedy and through violence (in my master’s dissertation, I studied Viktor Frankl’s “will to meaning” and what I deemed the humanness of cruelty.)³

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But alas, it’s time to go to the bookstore. There’s much to be done. As I continue to fill cardboard boxes with fading memories in what will soon cease to be our home, I can sense my obsession with this particular version of the past coming to an end because now it’s clear to me that

even the truest, most personal stories we tell ourselves are also fictions.

This is, really, what The Requisitions is all about. And while yes, I mis-remembered the title of the book that started it all, and while no, I can’t tell you that everything that happens in The Requisitions is true, I can tell you that it’s all based on the search for truth and the sanctity of memory.

Holding the urtext in my hand, The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich Adolf Hitler, I take a deep breath in recognition of what we know is true but never can seem to face:

there both is and isn’t a difference between history and fiction.

The Requisitions is a novel about all of this and it’s mostly set during the Nazi Occupation of Poland, but at its core it’s about something simpler, it’s about a novelist helping his mother clear out the childhood home so they can both finally let go of something heavy.

PS

For the 129/300 people who’ve already ordered a copy of The Requisitions, the books arrived early in Paris, which meant I had a last-minute Parisian “book launch” amongst friends. Here’s proof:

A Festivus Miracle: The Book Arrives Early in Paris

I still had to leave for a month the next day, which means most of you won’t receive a copy until mid/late January. Alas, I am not a consumerist corporation, just an indie author with a book, but I’m okay with slow indie publishing because I love how my book feels, and I’m tired of feeding the beasts that eat literature in the name of cheap books and faster deliveries.

But not to fear. An e-book version of The Requisitions will be available on my website the first-week of 2024. Place your order here for a single copy, or HOLIDAY OFFER: sign up for an annual subscription BEFORE JANUARY 1 and receive a signed-1st edition of my debut, Slim and The Beast (2015), a book about basketball, brotherhood, and growing up in North Carolina.⁴

1. ¡HOLIDAY REMINDER! BUY BOOKS FROM HUMANS NOT ROBOTIC BILLIONAIRE CONGLOMERATES WHO DREAM OF TURNING YOU INTO A CONSUMPTIVE ROBOT, TOO.

2. The term “historiographic metafiction” changed my way of understanding the past, and I have the author Brian Leung at Vermont College of Fine Arts for putting me onto it. For the literary nerds amongst us, you can read my MFA critical thesis here: History is Dead, Long Live History! Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction

3. Read the introduction to my master’s dissertation: The Humanness of Cruelty: Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl & The Psychology of Genocide

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