On Leave
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A long-lost French novel in which three soldiers return home from an unpopular, unspeakable war
When On Leave was published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, it told people things they did not want to hear. It vividly described what it was like for soldiers to return home from an unpopular war in a faraway place. The book received a handful of reviews, it was never reprinted, it disappeared from view. With no outcome to the war in sight, its power to disturb was too much to bear.
Through David Bellos's translation, this lost classic has been rediscovered. Spare, forceful, and moving, it describes a week in the lives of a sergeant, a corporal, and an infantryman, each home on leave in Paris. What these soldiers have to say can't be heard, can't even be spoken; they find themselves strangers in their own city, unmoored from their lives. Full of sympathy and feeling, informed by the many hours Daniel Anselme spent talking to conscripts in Paris, On Leave is a timeless evocation of what the history books can never record: the shame and the terror felt by men returning home from war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This new translation of author and journalist Anselme's first novel (his second and last was 1964's Relations) not only introduces the English-speaking world to a forgotten classic, little-read since its 1957 debut, it fills the surprising silence in French literature regarding the Algerian War. The story concerns a brief soldiers' leave to Paris, as experienced by one Sergeant Lachaume. Together with his friends, the infantryman Lasteyrie and the corporal Valette, Lachaume represents all of the reluctant conscripts who, from 1954 to 1962, fought an unpopular war on behalf of France's settlers in Algeria, only to return to an ungrateful populace. Suffice to say, no hero's welcome awaits Lachaume, whose wife has left him and whose dearest friends keep their distance, sending him on a long and drunken bender from deserted train stations to dive bars, punctuated by encounters with lecturing Marxists, tragic soubrettes, and homeless ex-Legionnaires. Amidst all this, Anselme finds time for extended inquiries into French identity (including, cheekily, a discussion of the pleasures of eating frogs) and magnificent renderings of Parisian cityscape, often through the eyes of its less fortunate citizens. Strikingly, there are few recollections of the Algerian conflict itself Anselme never served but this is nevertheless the brief, elegiac, searching novel that one of France's most unpopular wars deserves.
