by Michele Audin (tr. Christiana Hills)
Rating: ★★★
Less a book and more of a sketch-piece for various stylistic approaches to a subject. The fairly-plausible story buried in there, a history of a great French mathematician and his collaborationism during the occupation in World War II, was somewhat interesting and not a topic I've read much of before. Unfortunately, the author wasn't inclined to really develop this much, more consumed with their experiments, presenting some chapters as collections of documents, some as diary entries or letters, etc. None of this was particularly unexpected or novel, and I found the occasional repetition of various facts -- probably intended to enrich the picture by approaching events from different perspectives -- to actually be quite dull, as the story wasn't allowed to go anywhere that made these facts significant. A crust of references and some lists of artifacts do not make something detailed. I'm left with an overall feeling of 'so what?'.