Our Reading Journey
In our Fall 2026 session, we sat down at the table on 20 February 1933, when twenty-four industrialists cross Berlin to hear Hermann Göring ask them for money. They listen, they pay, and they go home to dinner. Five years later, the annexation of Austria unfolds through telephone calls, ultimatums delivered with good manners, and a luncheon in London where the conversation stays pleasant while a country disappears. The book runs under a hundred and fifty pages, and we read it slowly.
We kept reaching for the language of theater to describe what Vuillard does. The great events of the 1930s are staged for posterity, and he insists on looking backstage, where the actors are smaller, more anxious, and far more ridiculous than the official photographs suggest. The tanks that break down on the road to Vienna became, for us, a key to his method. By lingering on the farce, he strips the catastrophe of the grandeur that would make it seem inevitable, and returns it to the people who chose it, one courteous gesture at a time.
We also argued about the narrator, who never pretends to be neutral. He addresses us, he imagines what no archive records, and he passes judgment openly. Some of us found that freedom exhilarating; others wondered what a historian would say. The question the book leaves on the table is uncomfortable in a different way: those company names are still in our cars, our medicines, our appliances. What does it mean to read this story as their customers?
About the Author
Éric Vuillard was born in 1968 in Lyon and has worked in film as well as in literature, as a screenwriter and director. Book after book, he writes what he calls récits, compact narratives that seize on a documented moment of history and treat it with a novelist's eye, slipping into the rooms where power is actually exercised. He has applied this method to the conquest of the Congo, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and to the crowd that took the Bastille. L'Ordre du jour received the Prix Goncourt in 2017.