This is a book of understatement and a lack of (and a hard struggle for) understanding, of the unspeakable unspoken of.

At the end of the Second World War a photographer who witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps - captured, like a phtotgraph, in one still, silent image of a huddled figure - goes on an aimless journey round Germany taking pictures of the people he finds. He doesn't know why he's doing it, and nor does his driver, who has unpleasant memories of his own.

It's a short book, and tightly written - translated, I should say, from the original French - strangely lyrical and heavy with menace and mystery. There's not much in the way of plot, but what there is is atmosphere, insinuation, an uneasy sense of being in a newly-defeated country which has seen, and committed, hardly believable atrocities.

It's not pacy, or plot-driven, and won't be to everyone's taste. But it will appeal to poeple with some idea of the history behind it and who appreciate a subtle, immersive read.

Set in Dinslaken, Germany. July 1945. WW2 is over, and the allied forces are beginning to assess the situation and among them, is a war photographer who is reluctant to leave. In the company of a driver, he sets out to photograph ordinary German people in front of their homes.

Overall I was extremely disappointed with the story. It was a rather odd, quite short and I'm not sure it really portrayed the lives of those who were left behind after the war nor the photographer himself - at first I wasn't even sure the photographer was a man especially the way the colonel came into the room at night. Plus the story doesn't really go anywhere, it meanders along like the river they are following and occasionally stops to take a photograph of a family outside their home. We are given tit bits of why the driver doesn't want to return home but there is no real conclusion to it. Even the reason for wanting to take the photographs in the first place is not really explained.

The writing left a lot to be desired. There was one sentence (over 23 lines on my kindle version) that went on and on and on, and literally had eight ANDs and 3 BUTs in this single sentence! I don't know if this was the way it was translated or written but it was bad, such lack of full stops! There are also other places where it feels like the author is trying to throw in bits of description to make it a literary masterpiece, but they didn't add anything to the atmosphere or situation.

I received this book from Netgalley in return for a honest review.

I struggled to finish this small book. At the end of the 2nd ww a photographer and a young driver try to make some sense of the aimless bloody struggle by driving around Germany and meeting and photographing ordinary German people....that's it I could find no real deep meaning and found the storytelling somewhat bland.

A sparse and haunting novella set in Germany in the immediate aftermath of WW2. An unnamed British war photographer witnesses the horror of concentration camps and is unable to document what he sees or sleep at night. As British troops are leaving the area, he asks to stay on, driven by an almost obsessive need to photograph ordinary German families in front of their homes. He is given a car and a driver, O’Leary, a recent arrival from Sussex, also troubled by not actually seeing any fighting. The pair embark on an unsettling journey across an empty landscape, taking pictures of often unwilling Germans, avoiding storms, trying to comprehend what they have seen.

So much is left unsaid. With the protagonists barely able to process, let alone express what they have seen, Mingarelli uses landscape and the weather to signal the trauma and the complexity of the war. This is a subtle and thoughtful novella and also highly effective in what it omits. Excellent translation by Sam Taylor too.

Many thanks to Granta and Netgalley for the ARC.

This little marvel of a book has the haunting beauty of a fable and the emotional pull of stark realism. Set in the closing weeks of the war in Germany, a British photographer, attached to a combat unit, becomes possessed by the idea of taking pictures of German families outside their homes as a document of war’s aftermath. His commanding officer, Col. Collins, is fatigued and jaundiced by the privations of war but agrees to provide the photographer with a driver. The driver, O’Leary, has memories of Lowestoft and a troubling childhood among the dunes and now he is guilty about never having seen action or fired his rifle. In agreeing to sanction the request, Col Collins is like the father-figure in a Germanic folk tale, sending his sons out to discover the meaning of fear.
In the days before their journey begins, Collins leads his unit into an extermination camp and the photographer witnesses the scale of human tragedy. But the camps are not depicted in wide angle horror but are deftly captured by a single figure huddled in a grey blanket as evidence of some obscenity that was recently here. It is a devastating moment. During the photographer’s journey, Mingarelli doesn’t resort to tropes of hellish destruction and carnage but describes a landscape of desolate emptiness, a world settling after the deafening waves of sound from war. The prose is crystalline, spare and pure with stunning evocations of landscape. Places are bathed in hallucinatory light from flares fired into the sky and the driver’s rifle is fired randomly into the air in indiscriminate acts of overwhelming emotion.
A river runs through the landscape of their journey like the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, but it cannot escape the attention that the photographer’s increasingly aggressive and confrontational insistence that the German families stand for the photograph in front of their homes is hardly different from the scenes of the SS, herding families into quickly assembled groups for execution. These incidents escalate with grave consequences as the novel draws to its devastating conclusion. I can’t believe that its taken all this time to discover this marvellous writer.

The Horror! The Horror!

Here is another short novel by Hubert Mingarelli immaculately translated into English for the first time. Set immediately at the end of WW2 the protagonist is an English war photographer who has lately witnessed the Jewish death camps in defeated Germany. Perhaps as a means of reconciling himself to the horror he embarks on a car journey randomly through the countryside pausing only to photograph German families outside their homes. Can these seemingly normal, unaffected people be the same as those who perpetrated such cruelty and slaughter? If so, what does that say about the human condition?

Linked to the journey is the photographer’s young driver, a soldier who has arrived too late for action in the war and who cannot understand the point of the quest. The relationship between the two men is tense and equivocal. Of course it all ends with a violent act, as inevitable as the threatening storm evident throughout.

This is a novella about obliqueness, opacity and the unsayable: it's vague and unpindownable in some ways but I see that as deliberate and it conveys very well the numbed incomprehension of a photographer recording the final days and aftermath of WW2 in Germany. After entering one of the extermination camps, he finds himself unable to document what he sees there, barely able to process not just the magnitude and scale of the Holocaust but what it tells us about humanity and what we are capable of.

So much of this book is, on the surface, a fleeing from this revelation: all those comforting Enlightenment narratives of progress are brought to a halt and this novel pinpoints the moment this happens for one man. It's quiet and generally undramatic which serves to make the emotions, buried deep, both more potent and serve themselves as a figuration of meaning. The photographer travels around, taking photos of 'ordinary' Germans though he can never articulate to himself precisely why - as he does this, all the complexities of response emerge: comfort, empathy, rage, a sublimated urge for some kind of revenge that it especially terrifying both for its submerged malice and for the way it aligns him with the acts from which he is fleeing.

This is a very subtle book which invites the reader to consider what is not said, to perceive what lies in the interstices of the words and beneath the surface of the text. A short novel but a resonant one.

I requested this book after reading and enjoying A Meal in Winter. It follows an English photographer and his driver, O’Leary, in Germany at the end of the Second World War.

The photographer decides to take photos of ordinary German people outside their homes, though the reasons for this are unclear. After seeing the liberation of a concentration camp, it’s impossible not to wonder if it’s an attempt by the photographer to understand how people could allow such appalling war atrocities to take place. His anger seeps through during his requests for people to pose for his photos which are not always politely done.

The driver O’Leary has problems of his own. Only recently arrived in Germany, he isn’t well regarded by the rest of his regiment as he hasn’t seen action at the front. He also hints at issues at home that have deeply affected him and resulted in him sleeping rough in sand dunes.

It gives voice to the complexity of people’s experiences during the war and the effects it has on them. What I particularly enjoy about Mingarelli’s writing is the sparse and spare sentences, it’s like every word is weighed for it’s worth. He is also excellent at conveying a strong sense of landscape and setting. It’s a thought-provoking short novel and the reader is left with much to ponder about from what is said and what is left unsaid.

French novelist Hubert Mingarelli (1956-2020) wrote several books, of which two, both of them war novels, have been translated into English by Sam Taylor. Four Soldiers, which tells the story of four young comrades in the Russian Civil War, won the Prix Medici in 2003. The translation of A Meal in Winter, set in World War II, was nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. They are now joined by another World War II novel(la), Mingarelli’s last. La Terre Invisible was originally published in 2019, and is now being issued by Granta Books, also in Sam Taylor’s translation, as The Invisible Land.

As war novels go, this is a strange one, being set not during but in in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Its narrator is an English photographer placed with a battalion of Allied soldiers. Following the liberation of a concentration camp, the battalion settles at Dinslaken, in North-West Germany. The photographer, who cannot shake off the memory of the dead bodies in the concentration camp, asks leave to go on a strange mission around the surrounding countryside, photographing ordinary people in their daily environment. He is assigned a car and a driver, soldier O’Leary, who has just volunteered to join the army right at the end of the war.

The point of the narrator’s project is not clear, not even to himself. Perhaps he hopes that the scenes of ordinary life will displace the terrible sight of corpses piled on top of each other. Possibly, he is seeking to understand, through his camera, how ordinary Germans could have allowed the Nazi atrocities to take place. Perhaps it could be his way of seeking revenge. Certainly, the innocent request for a photograph sometimes takes ominous overtones, as when he insists on taking a picture of a young bride and groom despite their protests – it feels uncomfortably like a violation.

O’Leary unsuccessfully tries to prise from the narrator the purpose behind their mission. But he also has his own secrets. Chief amongst them is the question why, back in his hometown of Lowestoft, he preferred to sleep amongst the dunes rather than in his bed at home. The final scene, besides providing a satisfying coda to the narrative, hints at the answer.

I had a look at the reviews of the original French version and I was surprised at the low ratings given to this novel. It seems that readers’ reservations chiefly refer to the story’s vagueness. But that it is precisely what I liked about it. The Invisible Land is a poetic book, and like most poetry, it does not divulge its meanings easily. But there’s no denying the power of the novel’s images, which will haunt me for a long time: the narrator’s recurring dream of corpses under tarpaulins; a repast in an abandoned church with clouds scurrying across the window behind the altar; the car snaking its way along the river. In understated and elegant prose, brilliantly conveyed by translator Sam Taylor, The Invisible Land portrays a land of ravishing beauty, tainted by unspeakable crimes.

‘The Invisible Land’ is set in Germany at the end of WWII. An English photographer enters a concentration camp. He then decides to stay and roams the German countryside taking photographs of ordinary German people. He is accompanied by a young English soldier who has been assigned as his driver.

Mingarelli’s writing style and the themes of war and masculinity should be familiar to those who have already read his novel ‘Four Soldiers’ which was longlisted for the Internal Booker Prize. In both novels, Mingarelli goes beyond the traditional narrative of the heroic soldier and explores the complexity of that experience.

Central to the novel is the Shoah. The photographer witnesses the Shoah first-hand when he enters one of the Nazi extermination camps. He “hesitate[s]” and stops using his camera. Everything is changed by this horrific experience. How can we carry on looking and bear witness after the Shoah? How can we describe the indescribable? How can we carry on living and being in a world where the Shoah has taken place?

Mingarelli writes with incredible restraint, a laconic kind of writing that asks the reader to consider the silences and absences of the text and therefore the absences and the silences of history. A little gem of a novel.

With thanks to Granta for the digital review copy in exchange for my honest and unedited review.