“The sun is a cold star. Its heart, spines of ice. Its light unforgiving.”

FROM this simple, fairy tale short opening, you may deduce that things we know are not all they seem. Let us open up the catastrophe that was World War 2. How did we get there?

There is a sting in the tail of this masterful piece of journalistic faction that recreates from different perspectives and sources the arrival of Nazism. Vuillard’s writing – and Mark Polizzotti’s translation from the French – match the import of the subject, opening with the “24 calculating machines standing at the gates of Hell”.

Vuillard is angry and outraged, his storytelling has purpose, glaring a torchlight on the skeletons of the participants as we edge towards war and holocaust. At moments it is high farce, high drama, high pathos, high tragedy, He has read the testimonies, the biographies, watched the newsreels again. In simple terms he tells his tale of downfall, annexation, of hubris, of the power of a bluff.

Each chapter head speaks for itself: A Secret Meeting. Masks. A Courtesy Call, Intimidations. Carefully he mixes recollections with the novelists’s eye for visualising a drama. This was how, he contends, the real modern Europe was constructed. The humour is sardonic and concise – the book is only 129 pages of type spaced at a generous 18.5 point as if at pains to be sure as many people can read it as possible. He shuffles his scenes into a climax befitting his task.

It won the Prix Goncourt 2017. Proper writing, proper translation, proper publishing. Intelligent and topical.