Acquaintances over the years have thought I was putting them on when I told them about a famous – or perhaps I should say infamous – psychology experiment in the 1960s in which experimenters were surprised by how willing their subjects were to
go along with the experimenters’ instruction to administer what the subjects thought were ever-greater electric shocks to people in another room in an experiment supposedly about learning but actually about dominance, with experimenters expecting to encounter at least some resistance but instead getting near-total compliance. So willing, indeed, were the uninformed subjects to go along with what the experimenters asked of them, so ready to acquiesce to what they saw as responsible authority, that just the slightest nod of official encouragement could get them to administer levels of shocks so severe that, according to the instructor of the psychology course in which I first learned of the experiment, the people supposedly being shocked in the other room would be pounding on the other side of the wall begging for the shocks to stop.
Hard to believe, as I say, and not just the near-total compliance shown by the subjects, but also, especially when viewed through the lens of our socially conscious or “woke” times, that such an experiment could have been mounted at all, given the serious ethical considerations it raised – how would you like to go through life knowing you’d proven yourself a willing torturer.
But the experiment got at the abiding question of the years immediately following the Holocaust – what sorts of people could perpetrate the sorts of atrocities committed in the camps. And the uncomfortable answer, it seemed from the experiment, was a whole lot more people than you might think, a finding that was corroborated by a couple of other such later experiments, including one in which schoolchildren with blue eyes were told they were superior to kids with brown eyes and the blue-eyed kids lorded it over the brown-eyed kids with great relish, or another experiment in which subjects were divided into guards and inmates and, again, the guards showed no hesitancy in lording it over the inmates.
All of which is very much germane to Samuel Lopez-Barrantes’ “The Requisitions,” a metafiction in the vein of Julian Barnes or Salman Rushdie or Joan Didion (all of whom are cited in the novel) in which all three experiments are cited and which, for all its seemingly compelling story of three characters caught up in the Holocaust and the Lodz ghetto, nevertheless faces the difficulty inherent in all metafiction – how a reader can be expected to care about a book’s characters if they're told from the get-go, as they are in Lopez-Barrantes’ novel, that the characters are all figments of the author’s or main character’s imagination.
It’s something, of course, that’s true of all fiction by its very definition, that the characters or situations aren't real, with the difference being that in regular fiction the absence of any authorial intrusion can have a reader believing at least for a time that the characters actually are real, whereas in metafiction all such pretense of actuality is abandoned. So complete, indeed, is the dropping of the pretense of actuality that it gets at the very heart of what fiction is, whether it’s, in Graham Greene’s parlance, an “entertainment,” something to be enjoyed solely for its story line, or something more probing or philosophical in the way of, say, Rachel Cusk, of whom it’s been said that not just plot but characters have been jettisoned.
Not that characters in metafiction can’t be presented as fully rounded – a big part of Barnes’ accomplishment, for all his fictional playfulness, is his ability to still make you care about his characters, something that Lopez-Barrantes would have you feel for his characters as well, with how he so meticulously details the credentials of his main-character professor or how he particularizes the horrificness of the situations that engulf him and the other two main characters, a young woman and her conflicted German soldier.
But are they enough, amid the metafictional scaffolding, to truly engage a reader and have him turning pages?
It’s a question, obviously, to be decided by individual readers – personally, I found the metafictional aspect loosely enough integrated that it pretty well drops out completely during the last third of the novel – but however successful or not you find it, it’s not as put-offingly employed as with other metafictional authors, and along the way you’ll learn much that you might not have known about the Lodz ghetto in particular and the second World War in general – for instance, that in Lodz, the prewar Jewish population was almost 200,000 but by the end of the war was fewer than 10,000; and, about the war in general, that the usually given date of Sept. 1, 1939, for the war’s beginning, with Germany’s invasion of Poland, was preceded by German efforts to suggest provocation. Or as Lopez-Barrantes’ professor puts it, history in the end is the study of our own deception.

Wow! The Requisitions was definitely an enthralling story, and it had me thinking of the characters even after I put the book down.

The writing is intelligent, interesting, and sometimes grotesque. I could do without the “he squished his penis back into his pants” visual that was repeated at least three times, but other than that it was enjoyable.

I have yet to read a WWII book like this so it was definitely unique. I didn’t love the ending after he got me hooked on the characters, I’m left wondering what remains in the end.

Thank you Net Galley and Kingdom Anywhere Publishing for allowing me to read this book.