Hitler, Mussolini, and Me
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
1938, Hitler visits Italy. An expatriate Irish art historian is obliged to guide Mussolini and his guest round the galleries. Half fascinated, half repelled, he watches the tyrants, wrestling with the uneasy conviction that he ought to use the opportunity to 'do something' about them yet lacking the zeal that might transform misgivings into action.
Thirty years later, his daughter comes across a compromising clipping showing her father with the dictators. Exposed as a collaborator, the narrator explains what happened, what he did and did not do, and why, revealing in the process the part the girl's mother played in promoting the digestive disorders that were to influence the course of the war.
To help his daughter understand, he conjures a time before the crime that would define the century, a time before these men became monsters inflated to fit that crime, showing her the tawdry little people behind the myths, the real Hitler and Mussolini, The Flatulent Windbag and The Constipated Prick.
Based on historical events and using the tyrants' own words, Hitler, Mussolini, and Me brings the dictators down to earth, describing the murkier, more scurrilous aspects of their careers, and using jokes and scatology to weave a crazed pathway toward a cracked kind of morality. It is the story of an ordinary man living in extraordinary times, times when being ordinary was an act of rebellion in itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis's fourth novel is a hilarious scatological satire starring an Irish art historian living in 1938 Rome, which reduces the 20th century's two most notorious dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, to their most base selves, known as the Flatulent Windbag and the Constipated Prick. Colgan, the dissipated Irishman and unremarkable art historian, is hired to be Hitler and Mussolini's tour guide during a Fascist cultural tour of Italy's art museums. Colgan writes this story years later as a memoir to his daughter, trying to soothe her outrage over his association with the two ruthless tyrants, describing how he became an unwilling Fascist hero. Colgan's explanations of the 1938 tour events are truly funny: "there was something about Fascism that invited lavatory humour." Hitler is charmed by the Irishman's wit, calling Colgan "The Man Who Knows Everything," never realizing Colgan makes up his facts, mocking the ignorance of both dictators. Museum hopping around Italy leads Colgan to understand the menace of these powerful men, making him contemplate their assassination to possibly avoid the war everyone knows is coming. Goebbels, a nasty Hitler toady, then sets a trap for Colgan, deliberately testing him with the opportunity to kill Hitler, and Colgan spends the rest of his life rationalizing why he didn't do it. Fart jokes and suspense make this a terrific tale.
