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When the film opens three actors are onstage doing the penultimate scene from Julius Caesar. There is a rawness to the performances, and none of the studied theatricality we tend to expect from productions of Shakespeare. The play ends, the audience members rise to their feet, the actors shout with relief and joy and embrace each other. Then they clear the stage, and guards lead the actors back to their prison cells and lock them in. We are in the high-security wing of Rebibbia Prison in Rome, and the prisoners have just put on Julius Caesar.

The filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani follow the production from auditions to readings, rehearsals and opening night. Technically Caesar Must Die is a documentary, but it’s also a very intense drama set in the intersections between art and real life. The actors—mobsters, murderers, drug traffickers—don’t need the Method to bring Shakespeare’s drama of ambition, betrayal and violence to life; it is their life. Cannily the stage director urges them to speak in their own dialects: Shakespeare was English, but Julius Caesar is their hometown play.

Caesar is played by Giovanni Arcuri, a large, lordly man of influence in the prison community. When Salvatore Striano (a former inmate who had become a professional actor upon his release, and returned to Rebibbia for this movie—yes, it’s cheating, but it’s an excellent choice) as Brutus stops to note that his best friend had said almost the same lines to him before he was betrayed, we leave the world of art theory. Art is life, and freedom, and power. Caesar Must Die is the exercise of that power.

This is Secret Agent Drogon Hiddleston-Cumberbatch transmitting a report to headquarters.
He is clever and brave.
He is debonair and elusive.
He loves trouble.
His mission is to destroy all the enemies of the Feline Empire.
He’s a cat.

Write us a story of any length about Agent Drogon’s adventures. The prize is this omnibus edition of the Smiley Vs Karla novels by John Le Carré.

Post your stories in Comments by 13 January 2014.

The LitWit Challenge is brought to you by National Bookstore.

This year we’re going to list every book we read, and hot damn this is a great beginning.

We don’t even know how to say the title, an abbreviation of Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich (“Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”), but from the very first page we know we are in for something original and funny. Later it is quite moving. HHhH (Ash Ash ash Ash?) by Laurent Binet, English translation by Sam Taylor, is a book about the Nazi general Reinhard Heydrich’s rise to power, about the plan by the Czech government-in-exile to assassinate him, and about the process of writing such a book.

Binet grapples with the oxymoron that is historical fiction, with the inherent fakery of putting words in the mouths of dead people (to say nothing of the disrespect), with truth and knowability, with the inadequacy of words. How can you do justice to heroism? What can you say to people who give up their lives to fight evil? How can you turn historical persons into characters for your own literary purposes?

HHhH is probably too clever by half, and many readers will be annoyed by the frequent authorial intrusions, but it is undeniably a thrilling and audacious work. Binet doesn’t just blow the dust off history, he blasts it off.

* * * * *

First paragraphs:

Gabcik—that’s his name—really did exist. Lying alone on a little iron bed, did he hear, from outside, beyond the shutters of a darkened apartment, the unmistakable creaking of the Prague tramways? I want to believe so. I know Prague well, so I can imagine the tram’s number (but perhaps it’s changed?), its route, and the place where Gabcik waits, thinking and listening. We are at the corner of Vysehradska and Trojicka. The number 18 tram (or the number 22) has stopped in front of the Botanical Gardens. We are, most important, in 1942. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera implies that he feels a bit ashamed at having to name his characters. And although this shame is hardly perceptible in his novels, which are full of Tomases, Tominas, and Terezas, we can intuit the obvious meaning: what could be more vulgar than to arbitrarily give—from a childish desire for verisimilitude or, at best, mere convenience—an invented name to an invented character? In my opinion, Kundera should have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?

So, Gabcik existed, and it was to this name that he answered (although not always). His story is as true as it is extraordinary. He and his comrades are, in my eyes, the authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history, and without doubt the greatest of the Second World War…

In our second year in high school we were sent to an inter-school essay-writing contest on Mindanao issues held somewhere in Manila. The only thing we remember about that contest, apart from the fact that we were wearing new espadrilles that hurt like hell, is that our Social Science teacher Mrs Reyes took us to Solidaridad Bookshop in Ermita.

We had frequented bookshops from age five, but Solidaridad was different. Clearly it was a serious bookshop. Soli gave us our second inkling that there existed an intellectual life beyond family dinners, school, and the mass media. (The first inkling was Woody Allen movies—we wanted to know what those people were talking about. Who were Marshall McLuhan, Eva Braun, and Mahler?)

Since then we’ve tried to drop into Soli whenever we’re in the vicinity, which is not often (and they are closed on Sundays and holidays). If we’re lucky the owner F. Sionil Jose will be in the shop and we’ll walk over to Hizon’s for ensaymada, hot chocolate, a Dolphy sighting and a chat. (You can still have a Dolphy sighting, but it will be a paranormal experience.) Another time Mr. Jose hosted cocktails upstairs for the visiting author James Hamilton-Paterson.

It had been too long between visits to Solidaridad. Last Monday, en route to Ricky’s birthday dinner at Bayleaf Hotel in Intramuros, we did some year-end book-buying at Soli. They have plenty of NYRB books we haven’t seen in bigger bookstores—we found one of the lesser-known Colettes, Snows of Yesterday by our favorite semi-obscure Eastern European writer Gregor von Rezzori, and Born Under Saturn, the Wittkowers’ classic treatise on the traditional idea that artists are bonkers (which we are reading to prepare for our workshop). The shop has Edmund Wilson, Charles Duff’s A Handbook on Hanging, Jan Morris’s Conundrum, and a lot of other titles that necessitate a trip in mid-January.

The prices are a little higher than those in the big bookstore chains, but the chains are less likely to have these titles in stock, and you’d be supporting an independent institution.

Resolved: A trip to Solidaridad Bookstore every month.

Solidaridad Bookstore is at 531 Padre Faura St, Ermita, Manila. Telephone (02)254.1086.