Someday, you might want to remember...
Reviewing The Requisitions by Samuél Lopez-Barrantes
“Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death” - Viktor Frankl
Dear readers,
Recently I sat in my high-back chair, a steaming cup of Earl Grey beside me, a departure from the strong black coffee I rely on to start most days. In my hands, The Requisitions, recently received from Paris, where
resides with his wife, the American photographer Augusta Sagnelli, in a small flat next to the Bastille. He suggested his book is “Best enjoyed with a cup of tea for the first half and a glass of whiskey for the second.” I felt it best to follow his advice.Copy #183 of a limited print run of 300 is mine, signed and numbered by the author. Inside, a small bookmark with a personal, handwritten note on one side and details about his publication,
, on the other.You may or may not know, but I consider myself a sommelier of fine books. This vintage has a stark beauty: elegant yet understated, the smell of the paper and the ink setting the tone for what is to come. There is a heft to this volume despite its small stature. This is a beautiful book - the type that readers love to hold. I haven’t read a word and know a great story resides within.
Samuél and Augusta met on Leap Day, 2020, shortly before the world shut down. Their relationship developed via text messages between New Orleans and Paris - oceans and pandemics couldn’t prevent love. They shared their first kiss six months later, at the curbside of Newark International Airport.
By day, you will find him giving literary tours around Paris. Academically trained as a writer and social theorist, Samuél’s unique skillset makes him ideally suited to educate the curious on such wide-ranging topics as the Lost Generation, the Nazi Occupation of Paris, James Baldwin, and existentialism. He teaches a creative writing course at the Sorbonne when he isn't giving tours, and outside of work, he loves basketball as a player and a fan. A talented musician, he previously performed in an indie rock group called Slim and The Beast with his brother and close friend. But his real passion is writing novels. And it turns out that, like most everything else, he is good at writing.
As I read, the exquisite taste of the story emerges. On its surface, it is like many other historical fiction accounts of World War II. However, the undertones of this meta-fictional tale are complex notes of history and memory. The brutality of war lingers as an aftertaste in my mind alongside the undeniable warmth of friendship and loyalty. This is not a book for the faint of heart.
The Requisitions is the story of a boy who is obsessed with the history of the Holocaust, particularly the Nazi invasion of Poland at the beginning of the war. As he becomes a man, his mother encourages him to write a story about it - to help him understand and to ensure he doesn’t forget. “Someday, you might want to remember…”
The story our narrator writes is both beautiful and tragic. Following the lives of three characters, I experience the totality of the German invasion, occupation, and annihilation of the Polish Jews. First, there is Viktor - a professor, a man of letters, who represents a spirit of defiance in the face of abject evil. Next comes Elsa - the beautiful translator forced to work for the Nazi leaders, resisting their domination from within. Finally, Carl - the German police officer who represents the entirety of the German people mindlessly following an ideology to its doom.
With every page, I am drawn further into the experience. I realize that a visceral response is evoked as I am unable to remain safely away from the atrocity of war. How can humans treat other humans in this way? How do we ensure that we do not forget? If we fail, will we repeat the same?
This is a book that I will return to time and again. I love books that make me think and examine my ideas of the world. The Requisitions forces me to assess the relationship between history and memory. Are they the same? How do they differ? In the story of the European Jews, those who might remember have been relegated to the shadow of history. How do we tell the story of those who can not speak it for themselves?
I encourage you, dear readers, to get a copy of this book before they are gone. You won’t regret it. I know I don’t.
I was privileged to have the opportunity to ask Samuél a few questions about his life and his work. Those questions and his responses are shared below.
Where are you originally from, and where do you live now?
I was born alongside my twin brother in a town called Ganges, in the Occitania region in southern France. My parents were living at the Roy Hart Theatre commune at the time, which means we spent the first two years of our lives in a rustic chateau amongst voice and gesture teachers. When we were two years old, we moved to the USA. I grew up in Chapel Hill/Durham, NC, went to the University of Vermont (as did my brother), and I moved to Paris in 2010, where I’ve been ever since.
Could you tell us how reading came into your life?
I’ve been enamored with storytelling for as long as I can remember. One of the first books I recall reading—and felt like I was getting away with something—was Psycho. I remember locking myself in my room and devouring that story, amazed at how visceral it was to be able to plunge into such a haunting world, especially because as a reader, it felt like I was participating in creating it. I also grew up with Harry Potter (I remember waiting on my front porch for book deliveries), and from a young age imaginative worlds fascinated me (I loved Legos as a kid and would build towns to make room for all of the narratives in my head). C.S. Lewis was also a big influence as a kid, as were Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, and Gary Larson. To this day, those books are some of my most prized possessions.
How have your reading habits changed over the years?
For many years I thought I was going to be an academic, which helps explain why I decided to go into potentially perma-student debt for not one but two master’s degrees (the first in social theory from University College London, the second in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts). I've always loved challenging intellectual work and find that when I need to read something for “work” (or at least research) I am much more motivated to do so than if I have thousands of books in front of me with no structure to their analysis. This is probably why I’ve settled on a lifestyle as a part-time teacher and a tour guide … whenever I get bored with telling the same old stories, I just pick up a new book on the subject and delve back in. To this end, my reading habits have become much more regimented in regards to my professions (writing / teaching / tour guiding). At times I long for those glory days of youth when I could lock myself in my room and read the next Harry Potter or Ray Bradbury without any concern for what I wasn’t reading.
Could you share a book that influenced you and how it did so?
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is the most influential book I’ve ever read. Frankl was sent to various Nazi concentration camps as a Viennese psychoanalyst during WWII. The book is divided into two sections, one half a memoir of his experience in the camps, the other half an introduction to his existentialist theory (logotherapy). What’s fascinating about Frankl’s work is that he practiced psychotherapy in Auschwitz and wrote, ten days after his liberation, a deeply existential book about the potential beauty of humanity. It’s quite remarkable. Frankl suggests that what makes human beings unique is our ability to pursue purpose and find meaning in any given circumstance, even—or perhaps especially—when confronted with extreme cruelty and suffering.
Could you tell us about an underappreciated novel that you love?
Traveler of the Century by Argentinian author Andrés Neuman has always stuck with me for its narrative structure and philosophical themes. The juxtaposition of a story of forbidden love and a series of murders in a mythical town in Germany in the 19th century is fascinating, as are the philosophical discussions that take place in town, and the various characters, including a mysterious sage who lives in a cave. The more the protagonist tries to leave the town he finds himself wandering through, the more he’s incapable of getting away. There are inspiring elements of magical realism in the story, too, but more than anything else, Andrés Neumann weaves a damn good ball of yarn.
What are your thoughts on the importance of stories culturally?
I’m not sure if this is a trick question, but it seems to me that there’s no such thing as culture without stories. For most of human history, we didn’t have the luxury of reading or writing, which meant human beings had to rely on oral narratives, histories, and mythologies passed down through generations to understand how the world works and how we might work within it. Any culture that discounts the primordial value of storytelling is doomed to calcify, for the very simple reason that as far as I’m aware, the primary way to become a fully realized human being is to learn about existence through various forms of storytelling.
How did you decide to start writing?
The short answer is I never decided anymore than I woke up one morning and decided to start playing basketball or the piano. Reading and writing have always been part of my life, in large part because they were two acts that guaranteed I could have an excuse for being by myself. (Isn’t it amazing that even in this hyperconnected world, if somebody is reading, the world tends to leave them be?) As a twin brother, too, reading and writing allowed me to have my own personal, un-shareable time. Gertrude Stein said the art of civilization is to possess yourself as you are, and I find no faster way to remember what it is to be me than to enjoy a good book, whether that means I’m reading it or working on a novel … the latter does, of course, require a whole lot more patience and time.
What do you consider the most challenging part of the writing process?
The discipline of returning to the page every day. In my experience, any kind of deep artistic/creative work requires discipline, consistency, and struggle, and being able to continually sit down at the proverbial desk (proverbial because I can only dream of having a desk in my small Parisian apartment) and doing the work, regardless of how many words emerge from the process, is both the simplest and hardest thing to do when embarking upon a bigger writing project.
Please share with us what you have written and what you have in the works.
My debut novel, Slim and The Beast (Inkshares, 2015) is a coming-of-age story about the friendship between a famous college basketball player, The Beast, and Slim, a war veteran, as they navigate the transition from youth to adulthood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My latest novel, The Requisitions (Kingdom Anywhere, 2024) is a historical metafiction set in Nazi occupied Poland. I write various pieces on Substack (ifnotparis), and my wife and I are now working on a book-length version of our love story. As for the next novel, well, I’m excited to make room for whatever sentence gets stuck in my head for long enough to require a novel to understand it. The Requisitions, for example, was born with a single phrase: “when the sirens began, the professor was sitting at the Astoria café.”
Can you share with us a little about your writing process? What does your day look like when you are writing? Do you have a particular space you prefer to be in while writing?
When I’m writing well, I tend to create a 4–6-hour window in my day, separated from all forms of distraction. That window usually begins in the late-morning and finishes sometime in the late-afternoon. Wherever I write, which tends to be out of the house because it’s hard to live in a place that’s also your workplace, I seek out a space that has a limited Wi-Fi connection, if at all. Needless to say, my phone is on airplane mode, too, and on an ideal writing day, I make sure I don’t have anything on my schedule immediately after a good writing session. I find it takes me about thirty minutes to an hour to reacclimate into the real world, so to speak, and I tend to enjoy doing this by walking. My favorite place to write over the past years has been in the mezzanine of the Centre Pompidou (Paris’ premier museum of modern art), mostly because the coffee is decent, it’s easy to disappear into the building and the crowd, and I do believe my surroundings have an effect on my writing, which is why I’m happy to know museum goers, Kandinsky, Picasso, and hundreds of other artists are just next door if I need some motivation. I also write in a few different libraries for similar reasons: being around great texts–but also diligent students, researchers, and writers–helps ease me into a literary headspace.
What risks have you taken with your writing that have paid off?
My latest novel, The Requisitions, is the most challenging intellectual project I’ve ever embarked upon. Not only are there three protagonists whose interwoven narratives took me years to get right, but the metafictional narrator’s POV also took me about eight years to understand … lo and behold, it took me a decade to understand something important about myself (and, importantly, my relationship to my mother). Once I was able to see how all of the puzzle pieces fit together, I knew I had to write the novel in an entirely new way (I’d written three previous drafts). In many ways, I have a global pandemic to thank for giving me three months of uninterrupted time to write a rough draft of what would finally become something I am deeply proud of.
I do believe part of being a writer is publishing, or at least putting our work out into the world, but in terms of publishing, I’ve never followed the traditional route. When I started pitching Slim and The Beast to agents and publishers in 2014, I heard about a small press called Inkshares through a friend, which said that if I could raise $10,000 in pre-orders in three months, I could have a 1,000-copy print-run, retain 50% of sales, and would have a book tour. It sounded far better than anything legacy publishing could provide.
232 people later and my dream became reality. In 2022, I bought back the rights to that novel so that I could earn 100% of sales of a book I wrote and designed (what a concept!) instead of forking the vast majority over to Jeff Bezos.
For The Requisitions, my wife and I created an imprint to publish a limited-edition of 300 copies before we consider printing and distributing it on a larger scale. After years working with a shady music label, and following my experience publishing my debut, I wanted to retain the rights to my efforts before rescinding them to someone else. The risk paid off (there are fewer than 100 copies left as of March 2), which means when I decide to go for a larger distribution, I can have some leverage, but first and foremost, I can be proud of the knowledge that it is possible to do it oneself.
Who do you consider to be your literary influences?
The truth is every single book I read inspires me in some way (even bad books can reveal a lot about how to be a better writer), but if I had to choose who actually influenced my writing the most (which doesn’t mean they’re my favorites, but rather that they’ve had an outsized effect on me), here goes: JK Rowling, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David (yes, Seinfeld is a form of literature in my opinion), James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and for better and for worse (I’m a product of the early 2000s, after all), David Foster Wallace.
What advice would you give to a writer working on their first book?
First and foremost, stick to it. Writing is a muscle and muscles require exercise and discipline. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is an avid athlete, and for me, there’s a clear connection between the discipline of physical exercise and deep creative work. Semi-daily sacrifice and even (sometimes) pain is inevitable. The reward often comes after the struggle, and you won’t succeed every day, week, or even year, but there’s honor in showing up. I’m thirty-six years old, have been taking writing seriously for fifteen years, and have only just begun to feel like I have something to show for myself. Ta-Nehisi Coates says it far more eloquently. “It’s not that mystical … it’s perseverance.”
And one more thing: when a draft of the book is done, let it be! There’s a trope about writing books which I think Zadie Smith said years ago, but I’m sure many other writers also abide: when you finish a draft of a novel, lock the book away. DO NOT EDIT immediately. Give the truth of the story time to marinate–to seep in. And if, in a month or even a year’s time, when you pick it up, and if the story still resonates with you, then there’s magic in there, and it’s your job to coax that magic out. This is where perseverance is key. I put aside The Requisitions for two years before I dared reconsider it … and then I rewrote the entire thing from a different perspective because I finally understood what needed to be done. Had I not waited that long, the truth of the story that lingered in my head would’ve been edited into a perfectly pleasant structure and style–i.e. edited into oblivion.
Where can people connect with you online?
is where I write on Substack.For those interested in my more academic work as well as my walking tours, you can visit my personal website: samuellopezbarrantes.com (this is also where you can buy his book!)
I hope you have enjoyed this review and interview. I am excited to hear from you in the comments.
It was a treat to spend some time with your questions. Next time we’ll have to do it with our real life voices. And maybe I’ll interview you. Now that’s a thought
Terrific post, Matthew, with especially interesting results from your questioning of Barrantes.