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Chargement... First harvestpar Vladimir Pozner
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"As Nazi panzers rolled into Paris, June 1940, he left Paris behind to join his family in Correze. He stayed with Arlette and Renaud de Jouvenel, his best friends. There they met Aragon, the Prevert brothers, Marcel Duhamel, and many other refugees, particularly Spanish republicans.
Thus the Gestapo found his Paris apartment empty. As a public anti-fascist, and militant Jewish communist, Pozner sought asylum in the United States, and was able to get this. (Quite possibly, the State Department, notoriously stingy with visas for Europeans fleeing Nazi occupation, already had their eye on him for future war work.) Leaving for New York, where his wife and family were waiting, they soon found themselves moving to California, he stayed at first in Berkeley with Barbara and Haakon Chevalier. Charpentier, the Hollywood director shot "Liberty Ships" at Richmond in the bay of San Francisco. He worked on several films with Berthold Brecht, Jons Ivens, George Sklar, Saika Viertel (starring Greta Garbo), with whom he remained friends. He was nominated for Oscars, most original screenplay, in The Dark Mirror, won by Robert Siodmak."
So, a fascinating life, which I've learned about only because somewhere along the line I purchased this beautiful first edition copy and somewhat randomly decided to pull it down off my shelf and read it last week. So, now maybe, finally, I should actually talk about the novel itself!
The novel takes place, as mentioned above, in a small, Channel Coast French village under occupation by the German Army. For the bored occupiers, there is very little going on except cold, rainy weather. For the villagers, what's going on is malnutrition, as their cattle and crops are requisitioned by the Germans. A plan is underway among the villagers to hide their wheat crop, but where? This malevolently placid setting is interrupted when a German enlisted soldier turns up missing and the occupiers look to the occupied for answers. There is a mist of unreality throughout the proceedings, particularly in the novel's first half. The characters are not fully drawn. The Germans in particular seem almost cartoon like in their foolishness. There is a degree of fable telling in the narrative, perhaps. At the beginning, I thought once or twice of the book, [The Good Soldier Schweik], although here the comedic element is much more subdued. During the book's second half, however, as the tension and sense of menace mounts, any comedic sense still maintaining serves only to underscore the cruelty of the situation. This novel, one could say, is about the banality of evil. This is not a great novel. Although we do come to know and care about several of the villagers, the relative shallowness of the characterizations drains some impact from the proceedings. But the power of the situation itself has rendered this novel a very memorable one for me. I should mention that the book was published in 1943, so it was very much a novel of its moment. ( )