Fionnuala's Reviews > Civilizations

This is the third Laurent Binet book I've read and he continues to surprise and delight me with his creative approach to telling history-based stories. In the two previous books, HHhH and La Septième Fonction du langage, he looked at episodes in which famous/notorious men, SS Officer Reinhard Heydrich, in 1942, and French author Roland Barthes in 1980, suffered injuries which eventually lead to their deaths. Much of each narrative concerned the time lapse between the injuries and the deaths, a week in Heydrich's case and a month in Barthes's.

In the Heydrich book, Laurent Binet played with the dilemma an author encounters when he wants to tell a story faithfully yet has to invent any details that weren’t set down in the records at the time. In the Barthes book, he moved away from faithfulness to facts and instead played with alternative scenarios, triggered by the Barthes incident, which he then imagined impinging on other real events of the time.

In this third book, Binet goes further into the notion of alternative scenarios. He takes the reader back to Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492, and he imagines an alternative outcome which changes the course of world history. In the process, he shakes up the notions that we, at least those of us who hail from Europe, accept without thinking: new world, old world, north, south, east and west, notions which carry specific historical and geographical connotations for Europeans who for centuries have considered themselves at the centre of the 'civilised' world. And the notion of 'civilised' gets the biggest shake-up of all.

As you might expect, many famous names from the 1500s are characters in Binet's alternative history, Emperor Carlos V of Spain, François I of France, Henry VIII of England, Lorenzino de Medici of Florence, and many more including Luther and Erasmus, Thomas More and Pius V.

Renaissance artists such as Titian and Michelangelo also feature, and paintings commemorating the alternative history Binet invents are described in terms which make them resemble existing history paintings very closely—except that the Incan Emperor Atahualpa always has a prominent position among the European kings and queens. I enjoyed that a lot.

I also enjoyed the links to literature. Emperor Atahualpa is a fan of Machiavelli's writings, Michel de Montaigne is a character, and Miguel de Cervantes gets a leading role in the final section. Binet eventually gives Cervantes an alternative life in Central America but not before retelling some of the stories that are told in Don Quixote. The surprising thing in a book where everything is turned upside down and inside out is that those stories are remarkably faithful to the originals. It's hard to improve on Don Quixote!