C'est la Guerre

by Louis Calaferte, Austryn Wainhouse (Translator)

Overview

In C'est la guerre Louis Calaferte presents the World War II—from the moment its outbreak is announced to the public through the unprecedented disaster that ensues, and through France's liberation in 1945—as it registers itself in the ever more isolated consciousness of a young, nameless boy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810160323
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	06/09/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Louis Calaferte was born in Turin in 1928. He was a playwright, poet, and writer of prose. The Way It Works with Women, published by the Marlboro Press/Northwestern in 1998, was the first of his many novels to be translated into English.

Austryn Wainhouse is the founder of the Marlboro Press and has translated the works of the Marquis de Sade and Simone de Beauvoir, among others.

Editorial Reviews

C'est la guerre ( paper Jul.; 130 pp.; 0-8101-6032-3; paper 0-8101-6068-4): This 1993 novel from the French author of The Way It Works with Women (1998) is an impressionistic picture of street life in Paris under German occupation during WWII. The story's a collection of fragmentary observations made by its nameless narrator (he's 11 in 1939, when it begins); a mélange of experiences, overheard conversations, dreams, and fantasies. The matériel of the wartime experience—economic deprivation and black marketeering, the formation of the Resistance movement, wholesale sexual exploitation and irregularity—is quite effectively conveyed by a skillful alternation of (nicely translated) explosive sentence fragments with long, meandering, run-on revelations of its anonymous (in fact, generic) protagonist's gradually developing predatory amorality, his realization that "If you know the tricks wartime's a happy hunting ground." A grim and powerfully convincing picture of ordeal and survival, all the more effective by virtue of its sedulous understatement.

Kirkus Reviews

"Bracingly unsentimental, [it] is a remarkable song of innocence sung in perfect pitch." --St. Petersburg Times



"In compact and visceral detail, Calaferte succeeds in portraying this terrifying and shameful period in French history, when nearly everyone--especially seemingly innocent villagers--is guilty of crimes against humanity." --Publishers Weekly



"One's will can be deployed at others' expense, a fundamental ambivalence that Calaferte . . . often brought to light. Because of this excruciating honesty, he produced some of the most troubling writings of recent times." --Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher