In this obsidian gemstone of a book, the novelist and film-maker Éric Vuillard uses such details—moments of farce, historical flotsam—to conduct a powerful argument against the inevitability of history ... In Mark Polizzotti’s translation, the prose has an aphoristic gleam ... And [Vuillard] is brilliant on the authoritarian’s relationship to the law, when describing how Hitler insisted that the Austrian president must accept his chancellor’s resignation ... However you decide to categorize it, this is a thoroughly gripping and mesmerizing work of black comedy and political disaster.
The result of painstaking research, [The Order of the Day] is related to 'fiction' in the sense that real historical events are arranged and narrated in ways that are somewhat similar to the suspenseful, dramatic storytelling techniques of traditional historical novels. By highlighting certain interrelated actions and individuals, Éric Vuillard provides a fresh, multifaceted reexamination of a seemingly well-known moment of twentieth-century history.
The method of this unusual work...is to peel away the veils of dissimulation, disguise and self-justification that conspire to make historical disasters appear as just the way things happen. While The Order of the Day has the rhythm and tenor of fiction, it is really a historical essay ... the author utilizes mundane facts or events, converting them by literary alchemy into gleaming pieces of a puzzle. From time to time, the author’s own voice breaks through, warning the reader against being duped ... The Vuillard tone, ironic, persistent, aggressive—at times merciless—is well caught in English by the translator Mark Polizzotti ... Mr. Vuillard has relied on a range of firsthand accounts of the events in question, and some readers might have welcomed a few source notes. But history as recitation—a tale told in a singular voice—can probably do without them.
...powerful ... The book...chronicles that great catastrophe in tiny yet well-paced steps: small enough to allow for a tantalizing buildup, steady enough for the reader to behold and be appalled by the full scale of the unfolding disaster. The result is a sure-footed blend of storytelling and re-evaluated history.
Éric Vuillard's The Order of the Day covers this moment in Austrian history, and reveals it as more than just an Austrian moment. Buried in this event are all the elements which led to the spread of fascism in Europe: greed, ambition, obsequiousness. The elitism and greed of corporate capitalists, eager to hedge all their bets and finance any rising star, however odious; the servile deference of public figures who preferred to follow the rising (Nazi) political stars rather than confront them in the name of decency, integrity or democracy; the fawning and genteel ignorance of Western governments, who didn't know how to respond to the brutish idiocy of Hitler and the opportunistic goons he surrounded himself with ... It's short, scathing, and the highly stylized literary narrative achieves near-poetic heights of form. Still, it's well-researched and defiantly concrete as well.
... Vuillard demonstrates that the history of Germany during the 1930s is not quite as clear-cut as we often believe it to be ... Vuillard tells his version of the story with the delicate craftmanship of a miniaturist ... Vuillard has written a magnificently entertaining account that manages to capture the wild and uneven emotional climate of the 1930s and speaks too to our own era of liars, demagogues and politics as farce, which, as Vuillard deftly shows us, can slide all too quickly into tragedy.
... eerily resonant ... But subtle [the book] isn’t. Vuillard is rather too fond of the sound of his own voice for that. He favours overblown allusions over insight, and grandiose statements over character ... The result is not quite insightful as history, nor satisfying as fiction.
Poetically translated by Mark Polizzotti, the book shines a light on the industrial titans and politicians behind Hitler’s might. With chilling precision and moral authority, Vuillard draws a straight line between the marching orders Hitler gave to Germany’s moguls, and the Anschluss ... Vuillard’s language is beautifully and economically crafted; his judgments raise crucial questions.
The Order of the Day is executed with arch style and theatrical swagger, consolidated by self-regarding glee ... Vuillard delights in juxtaposing tiny details with major historical realities ... although based on history, The Order of the Day is not history—it is fact mixed with opinionated bombast ... Vuillard exploits the behind-the-scenes chaos. There are rare moments of pathos ... It is easy to smirk knowingly on reading Vuillard’s cold, clever little turn, and laugh at the horrible real-life personalities, as I did, but also end up feeling queasy, as if having shared in a rather mean, arrogant joke.
The play is about to begin,' (Vuillard) writes on the first page, 'but the curtain won’t rise….Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.' Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends ... In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.
In this brief volume, French filmmaker and writer Vuillard creates a philosophical, empathetic, and...speculative reconstruction of a couple of events from the history of the Third Reich ... Vuillard homes in on bitter historical foreshadowing and ironies, such as the fact that gas service for many Austrian Jews was cut off following the annexation because they had used too much gas and not paid their bills—in many cases, because they had committed suicide using gas. 'Don’t believe for a moment this all belongs to some distant past,' Vuillard writes, and this poetic, unconventional history compels the reader to agree.
