Author: Louis Guilloux
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Book Description
Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.
Blood Dark
Author: Louis Guilloux
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Book Description
Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Book Description
Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.
OK, Joe
Author: Louis Guilloux
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226310574
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 139
Book Description
Keeping company with American soldiers and immersed in translating accounts of these horrific crimes, Louis encounters a casual and insidious racism in military culture as he comes to realize that the accused men are almost all African Americans."
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226310574
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 139
Book Description
Keeping company with American soldiers and immersed in translating accounts of these horrific crimes, Louis encounters a casual and insidious racism in military culture as he comes to realize that the accused men are almost all African Americans."
The Interpreter
Author: Alice Kaplan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743274814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs, as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. Yet liberation is a messy, complex affair, in which cultural understanding can be as elusive as the search for justice by both the liberators and the liberated. Occupying powers import their own injustices, and often even magnify them, away from the prying eyes of home. One of the least-known stories of the American liberation of France, from 1944 to 1946, is also one of the ugliest and least understood chapters in the history of Jim Crow. The first man to grapple with this failure of justice was an eyewitness: the interpreter Louis Guilloux. Now, in The Interpreter, prize-winning author Alice Kaplan combines extraordinary research and brilliant writing to recover the story both as Guilloux first saw it, and as it still haunts us today. When the Americans helped to free Brittany in the summer of 1944, they were determined to treat the French differently than had the Nazi occupiers of the previous four years. Crimes committed against the locals were not to be tolerated. General Patton issued an order that any accused criminals would be tried by court-martial and that severe sentences, including the death penalty, would be imposed for the crime of rape. Mostly represented among service troops, African Americans made up a small fraction of the Army. Yet they were tried for the majority of capital cases, and they were found guilty with devastating frequency: 55 of 70 men executed by the Army in Europe were African American -- or 79 percent, in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black. Alice Kaplan's towering achievement in The Interpreter is to recall this outrage through a single, very human story. Louis Guilloux was one of France's most prominent novelists even before he was asked to act as an interpreter at a few courts-martial. Through his eyes, Kaplan narrates two mirror-image trials and introduces us to the men and women in the courtrooms. James Hendricks fired a shot through a door, after many drinks, and killed a man. George Whittington shot and killed a man in an open courtyard, after an argument and many drinks. Hendricks was black. Whittington was white. Both were court-martialed by the Army VIII Corps and tried in the same room, with some of the same officers participating. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different. Guilloux instinctively liked the Americans with whom he worked, but he could not get over seeing African Americans condemned to hang, Hendricks among them, while whites went free. He wrote about what he had observed in his diary, and years later in a novel. Other witnesses have survived to talk to Kaplan in person. In Kaplan's hands, the two crimes and trials are searing events. The lawyers, judges, and accused are all sympathetic, their actions understandable. Yet despite their best intentions, heartbreak and injustice result. In an epilogue, Kaplan introduces us to the family of James Hendricks, who were never informed of his fate, and who still hope that his remains will be transferred back home. James Hendricks rests, with 95 other men, in a U.S. military cemetery in France, filled with anonymous graves.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743274814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs, as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. Yet liberation is a messy, complex affair, in which cultural understanding can be as elusive as the search for justice by both the liberators and the liberated. Occupying powers import their own injustices, and often even magnify them, away from the prying eyes of home. One of the least-known stories of the American liberation of France, from 1944 to 1946, is also one of the ugliest and least understood chapters in the history of Jim Crow. The first man to grapple with this failure of justice was an eyewitness: the interpreter Louis Guilloux. Now, in The Interpreter, prize-winning author Alice Kaplan combines extraordinary research and brilliant writing to recover the story both as Guilloux first saw it, and as it still haunts us today. When the Americans helped to free Brittany in the summer of 1944, they were determined to treat the French differently than had the Nazi occupiers of the previous four years. Crimes committed against the locals were not to be tolerated. General Patton issued an order that any accused criminals would be tried by court-martial and that severe sentences, including the death penalty, would be imposed for the crime of rape. Mostly represented among service troops, African Americans made up a small fraction of the Army. Yet they were tried for the majority of capital cases, and they were found guilty with devastating frequency: 55 of 70 men executed by the Army in Europe were African American -- or 79 percent, in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black. Alice Kaplan's towering achievement in The Interpreter is to recall this outrage through a single, very human story. Louis Guilloux was one of France's most prominent novelists even before he was asked to act as an interpreter at a few courts-martial. Through his eyes, Kaplan narrates two mirror-image trials and introduces us to the men and women in the courtrooms. James Hendricks fired a shot through a door, after many drinks, and killed a man. George Whittington shot and killed a man in an open courtyard, after an argument and many drinks. Hendricks was black. Whittington was white. Both were court-martialed by the Army VIII Corps and tried in the same room, with some of the same officers participating. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different. Guilloux instinctively liked the Americans with whom he worked, but he could not get over seeing African Americans condemned to hang, Hendricks among them, while whites went free. He wrote about what he had observed in his diary, and years later in a novel. Other witnesses have survived to talk to Kaplan in person. In Kaplan's hands, the two crimes and trials are searing events. The lawyers, judges, and accused are all sympathetic, their actions understandable. Yet despite their best intentions, heartbreak and injustice result. In an epilogue, Kaplan introduces us to the family of James Hendricks, who were never informed of his fate, and who still hope that his remains will be transferred back home. James Hendricks rests, with 95 other men, in a U.S. military cemetery in France, filled with anonymous graves.
Bitter Victory
Author: Louis Guilloux
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 588
Book Description
Set in Guilloux’s hometown during World War I, it has as its central character an idealist embittered by experience, driven by his sense of the absurdity of existence to a point beyond hope or despair.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 588
Book Description
Set in Guilloux’s hometown during World War I, it has as its central character an idealist embittered by experience, driven by his sense of the absurdity of existence to a point beyond hope or despair.
Ananda Devi
Author: Ritu Tyagi
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401209960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
Ananda Devi: Feminism, Narration and Polyphony is the first full-length monograph devoted to Ananda Devi, a dynamic contemporary Francophone writer. Recipient of Prix Louis-Guilloux and Prix Télévision Suisse Romande du Roman, she is described by many as a prototype of a new generation of Mauritian writers. This book analyses Devi’s unconventional polyphonic narratives, particularly, her strategies that allow marginalized narrators to disrupt androcentric and dominant structures of narrative construction, thereby creating hybrid magical spaces for feminine expression. Drawing on the notion of feminist narratology that investigates the relation between gender and narrative, this book focuses on a wide range of Western and non-Western narrative strategies such as plot and plotlessness, narrative metalepsis, pluritemporality, multisubjectivity, myths, folktales and magic. It also demonstrates how her texts become the point of convergence of the West and the non-West, the feminine and the androcentric, the real and the extra-real as muted discourses resurface and traditional distinctions between categories are blurred in favor of alternate and new possibilities. As this book is interdisciplinary in its approach, it will appeal to a broad range of audience from those interested in Contemporary Francophone and Indian-Ocean Literature to scholars in Women’s Writing, Post-Colonial Studies, and Narratology.
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401209960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
Ananda Devi: Feminism, Narration and Polyphony is the first full-length monograph devoted to Ananda Devi, a dynamic contemporary Francophone writer. Recipient of Prix Louis-Guilloux and Prix Télévision Suisse Romande du Roman, she is described by many as a prototype of a new generation of Mauritian writers. This book analyses Devi’s unconventional polyphonic narratives, particularly, her strategies that allow marginalized narrators to disrupt androcentric and dominant structures of narrative construction, thereby creating hybrid magical spaces for feminine expression. Drawing on the notion of feminist narratology that investigates the relation between gender and narrative, this book focuses on a wide range of Western and non-Western narrative strategies such as plot and plotlessness, narrative metalepsis, pluritemporality, multisubjectivity, myths, folktales and magic. It also demonstrates how her texts become the point of convergence of the West and the non-West, the feminine and the androcentric, the real and the extra-real as muted discourses resurface and traditional distinctions between categories are blurred in favor of alternate and new possibilities. As this book is interdisciplinary in its approach, it will appeal to a broad range of audience from those interested in Contemporary Francophone and Indian-Ocean Literature to scholars in Women’s Writing, Post-Colonial Studies, and Narratology.
Small Lives
Author: Pierre Michon
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1935744704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Small Lives (Vies minuscules), Pierre Michon’s first novel, won the Prix France Culture. Michon explains that he wrote it "to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis." Le Monde calls it "his chef d’oeuvre. A bolt of lightening." In Small Lives, Michon paints portraits of eight individuals, whose stories span two centuries in his native region of La Creuse. In the process of exploring their lives, he explores the act of writing and his emotional connection to both. The quest to trace and recall these interconnected lives seared into his memory ultimately becomes a quest to grasp his own humanity and discover his own voice.
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1935744704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Small Lives (Vies minuscules), Pierre Michon’s first novel, won the Prix France Culture. Michon explains that he wrote it "to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis." Le Monde calls it "his chef d’oeuvre. A bolt of lightening." In Small Lives, Michon paints portraits of eight individuals, whose stories span two centuries in his native region of La Creuse. In the process of exploring their lives, he explores the act of writing and his emotional connection to both. The quest to trace and recall these interconnected lives seared into his memory ultimately becomes a quest to grasp his own humanity and discover his own voice.
Violence in French and Francophone Literature and Film
Author: James Day
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042024623
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Book Description
Stories of violence — such as the account in Genesis of Cain's jealousy and murder of Abel — have been with us since the time of the earliest recorded texts. Undeniably, the scourge of violence fascinates, confounds, and saddens. What are its uses in literature — its appeal, forms, and consequences? Anchored by Alice Kaplan's substantial contribution, the thirteen articles in this volume cover diverse epochs, lands, and motives. One scholar ponders whether accounts of Huguenot martyrdom in the sixteenth-century might suggest more pride than piety. Another assesses the real versus the true with respect to a rape scene inThe Heptameron. Female violence in fairy tales by Madame d'Aulnoy points to gender politics and the fragility of female solidarity, while another article examines similar issues in the context of Ananda Devi's works in present-day Mauritius. Other studies address the question of sadism in Flaubert, the unstable point of view of Emmanuel Carrère'sL'Adversaire, the ambivalence toward violence in Chamoiseau's Texaco, the notions of “terror” and “tabula rasa” in the writings of Blanchot, the undoing of traditions of narrative continuity and authority in the 1998 film,À vendre, and consequences of the power differential in a repressive Haiti as depicted in the filmVers le Sud (2005). Paradoxes emerge in several studies of works where victims may become perpetrators, or vice versa.
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042024623
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Book Description
Stories of violence — such as the account in Genesis of Cain's jealousy and murder of Abel — have been with us since the time of the earliest recorded texts. Undeniably, the scourge of violence fascinates, confounds, and saddens. What are its uses in literature — its appeal, forms, and consequences? Anchored by Alice Kaplan's substantial contribution, the thirteen articles in this volume cover diverse epochs, lands, and motives. One scholar ponders whether accounts of Huguenot martyrdom in the sixteenth-century might suggest more pride than piety. Another assesses the real versus the true with respect to a rape scene inThe Heptameron. Female violence in fairy tales by Madame d'Aulnoy points to gender politics and the fragility of female solidarity, while another article examines similar issues in the context of Ananda Devi's works in present-day Mauritius. Other studies address the question of sadism in Flaubert, the unstable point of view of Emmanuel Carrère'sL'Adversaire, the ambivalence toward violence in Chamoiseau's Texaco, the notions of “terror” and “tabula rasa” in the writings of Blanchot, the undoing of traditions of narrative continuity and authority in the 1998 film,À vendre, and consequences of the power differential in a repressive Haiti as depicted in the filmVers le Sud (2005). Paradoxes emerge in several studies of works where victims may become perpetrators, or vice versa.
Writing to Save a Life
Author: John Edgar Wideman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501147285
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
An award-winning writer traces the life of the father of iconic Civil Rights martyr Emmett Till--a man who was executed by the Army ten years before Emmett's murder. An evocative and personal exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of the most formidable Black intellectuals of our time. In 1955, Emmett Till, aged fourteen, traveled from his home in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. Several weeks later he returned, dead; allegedly he whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie, wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. She chose to leave his casket open. Images of her brutalized boy were published widely. While Emmett's story is known, there's a dark side note that's rarely mentioned. Ten years earlier, Emmett's father was executed by the Army for rape and murder. In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, a silent victim of American injustice. Wideman's personal interaction with the story began when he learned of Emmett's murder in 1955; Wideman was also fourteen years old. After reading decades later about Louis's execution, he couldn't escape the twin tragedies of father and son, and tells their stories together for the first time. Author of the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Wideman brings extraordinary insight and a haunting intimacy to this devastating story. An amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, Writing to Save a Life is completely original in its delivery--an engaging and enlightening conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons. Wideman turns seventy-five this year, and he brings the force of his substantial intellect and experience to this beautiful, stirring book, his first nonfiction in fifteen years.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501147285
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
An award-winning writer traces the life of the father of iconic Civil Rights martyr Emmett Till--a man who was executed by the Army ten years before Emmett's murder. An evocative and personal exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of the most formidable Black intellectuals of our time. In 1955, Emmett Till, aged fourteen, traveled from his home in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. Several weeks later he returned, dead; allegedly he whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie, wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. She chose to leave his casket open. Images of her brutalized boy were published widely. While Emmett's story is known, there's a dark side note that's rarely mentioned. Ten years earlier, Emmett's father was executed by the Army for rape and murder. In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, a silent victim of American injustice. Wideman's personal interaction with the story began when he learned of Emmett's murder in 1955; Wideman was also fourteen years old. After reading decades later about Louis's execution, he couldn't escape the twin tragedies of father and son, and tells their stories together for the first time. Author of the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Wideman brings extraordinary insight and a haunting intimacy to this devastating story. An amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, Writing to Save a Life is completely original in its delivery--an engaging and enlightening conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons. Wideman turns seventy-five this year, and he brings the force of his substantial intellect and experience to this beautiful, stirring book, his first nonfiction in fifteen years.
Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War
Author: Stéphanie Roulin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137388803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
How was anti-communism organised in the West? This book covers the agents, aims, and arguments of various transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War. Existing narratives often place the United States – and especially the CIA – at the centre of anti-communist activity. The book instead opens up new fields of research transnationally.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137388803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
How was anti-communism organised in the West? This book covers the agents, aims, and arguments of various transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War. Existing narratives often place the United States – and especially the CIA – at the centre of anti-communist activity. The book instead opens up new fields of research transnationally.
Those Who Forget
Author: Geraldine Schwarz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501199102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
“[Makes] the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.” —The New Yorker “Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly). During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501199102
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
“[Makes] the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.” —The New Yorker “Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly). During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).