Cassie McCullagh

Is it at heart a moral question about how ordinary life can go on while fascism is on the rise?

But after the war, it made a huge impact, didn't it?

And writers like Gunter Grass say, this was the novel that helped me shape my own morality and view of the world.

And even, I mean, we heard an extract from the film, you know, that World War II is going on and that film's being seen.

It is being read in other parts of the world.

What do you make of that in terms of the impact of, because we're reading it as history, but

But of course, it's a contemporary novel.

This is one of the things that's very, very interesting about reading it, because when I think of the Holocaust, I'm filled with the images I've seen in documentaries and the things I've read about the horrifying details of camps and the obvious consequence of it that we've been dealing with for the last century.

But this is written in the midst of it.

Well, or before it.

Well, it's in the midst of this rise of fascism, which is so slippery and so hard to define and become so personal.

It's intertwined in the most intimate relationships, the social transactions that are going on.

And that's what surprised me about this book, because I was expecting to be...

given images that horrified me.

Instead, I'm seeing this really seething, insidious, inveigling form of terror, which actually is very different.

And I also thought of Suite Francaise, that book by Irini Nemirovsky, which was only published in 2004, which...

detailed the same kind of experience in France.

Now, sadly, she didn't survive the war.

She died in Auschwitz.

And the novels that she wrote was going to be a five-part sort of suite.