The world. A Family Story, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (London, 1965) is apparently the most subjective book imaginable: the effort of an explanation of life in times of confinement that brings you closer to the famous song by Jimmy Fontana that had such an effect in the mid sixties; but in reality it is a book full of objective and universal meanings that starts from a very simple premise, but which becomes decisive: "the family continues to be the essential unit of human existence, even in the era of artificial intelligence and galactic warfare." ”.
And thanks to this premise, the author of The Court of the Red Tsar, Call Me Stalin and The Romanovs dares, which is not a little daring, to establish a picture of the events of human life through ingenious statements that, being risky, become polemical (“Isabel of Castilla tortures her daughter, Charlemagne sleeps with his”) or generating amusing cluelessness that shows that Sebag is human after all: on page 161 he places Spartacus at the foot of Mount Etna (which is in Sicily), instead of Mount Vesuvius (which is in Campania).
A brilliant painting, in short, centered “on people, families and cliques”, profoundly lyrical, which exudes a cheeky self-portrait between the lines of a complicated drawing, since it is evident, as he confesses, that he is “a historian of power; where geopolitics becomes the engine of world history and I (meaning him) have spent most of my career writing about Russian leaders." Or that, at a certain moment, when talking about the annexation of Austria by Hitler, he allows himself a truly personal note (page 1,123): "In Vienna, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild was not quite sure if it was convenient for them to leave or not, but his wife—an elegant Englishwoman named Clarice Sebag Montefiore—learned from a lover who worked in the Foreign Office that the Nazis had drawn up a list of Jews they would arrest; so they packed their bags and took the car to France”.
And all this writing in his own way and manner, attracted by the passions and furies that, like a good Briton, expresses them in two tones, the sublime with which he writes the circumstances and general frameworks of a civilization, the vulgar to sentence, prosecute, or simply amuse the reader.
The obsessive motive of the need to continue counting on the strength of kinship expresses the historian's feeling of alarm in the face of the uncertainty of current times. To counter the threat of dogmatic isms, it is not enough for him to affirm that "the ideologies of history do not usually survive contact with the confusing heterogeneity, nuances and complexity of human life" but rather he clings to the norm of deconstructivist philosophy of historicism by affirming, following Michel Foucault, that "the individual has always been constituted in relation to power".
References to "the dark matter of history" (wars, crimes, violence, slavery and oppression) are abundant, but he never does the same with today's dark matter (lies, propaganda, greed, excessive taxation) as if he wanted to avoid a allegorical reading of mundane behavior over several millennia.
This theater of the world is structured in 23 acts, ranging from the visible beginning of what we call history four thousand years ago with the families of Sargon and Amosis to the current clans of the Trump, the Kim, the Putin, the Zelensky or the Xi. A postmodern encyclopedia based on an agile, contrapuntal, precise and intentional style, in the vein of Herodotus, where characters and events come and go without a break at a pace that is sometimes frantic, other times simply caustic, and which allows you to speak with the same familiarity as Cleopatra or Jackie Kennedy, Caesar or Gorbachev.
In any case, the characters are always qualified, and inevitably, with epithets adjusted to their character following Homer's model: "provincial idiot" to refer to Roosevelt, "repulsive, sadistic and rapist Georgian" to speak of Beria, " braggart Texan” to establish the character of Bush Jr. or “intolerant and intolerable, unpleasant and cruel” to establish Steve Jobs, the greatest transformer of our current world since he designed a computer for mass consumption that he called Apple. The use of epithets allows him to display the historical judgment warning the reader about how to proceed from it.
So far the procedures of a narrative of more than fourteen hundred pages about the families that marked the course of history with an indelible stamp: I would now like to comment on the very brief conclusion of barely seven pages in which the historian becomes a commentator on current affairs at the time to judge two levels that are very present today.
The first is that "history is moved by both clowns and visionaries" thereby indicating that the drama of our time is the drama of the exaltation of some idiots who drive the course of events (in our country we are well served by that ); the second plane is less reassuring, it is about adjusting the cost of globalization that, after alleviating diseases and famines, sees how “billions of people lack access to loot and their cheap convenience requires dangerous agreements with enemies”. And there comes the sentence that we have all talked about at some point: "Covid-19 is probably just the test of a future flu epidemic that will be more serious."
I believe that these last pages fully represent the range of interpretive possibilities of Sebag's story; even more so, the range of its cultural implications, that rainbow that goes from the laughter that it has given us throughout the narrative to the descent into the darkest and most sulfurous abysses of our current world where an unceasing loss is felt. In short, a great big book that requires patience and a taste for reading to face it. The two virtues that can still save us from the abyss to which we are headed almost without remedy.
Simon Sebag Montefiore. The world. A family story
Criticism. trad. by E. del Valle and G. Garcia. 1,446 pages 34.90 euros
