The Second Notebook

It is 1936, and the Grand Prix circuit is the most glamorous stage in Europe. The Silver Arrows of Mercedes and Auto Union are winning everything, the crowds are enormous, and a British journalist named Arthur Cavendish has the access every reporter wants: the paddocks, the dinners, the drivers themselves.When British Intelligence asks him to pass along what he hears, Arthur tells himself it is harmless. He is a writer, not a spy. He is a witness, not a participant. Beside him, an American photographer named Clara is less easily deceived.Across four seasons and the circuits of Europe — Monaco, Tripoli, the Nürburgring, Spa — Arthur watches the flags multiply and the machinery of spectacle tighten around the men he has come to know. Richard Seaman. Rudolf Caracciola. Hermann Lang. Drivers who have become symbols whether they chose to be or not. Arthur records what he sees and files what the papers will print, and the distance between those two things grows wider every year.Now it is 1952. Le Mans. Arthur has been carrying the story for sixteen years, and he has come to tell it to the one man who was there — who drove those cars, under those flags — and might understand what it cost to see so much and say so little.The Second Notebook is a novel about complicity, memory, and the slow arithmetic of conscience. About what it means to be present at history and choose, repeatedly, to remain an observer. Read more