On Leave: A Novel - Hardcover

Anselme, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865478953 ISBN 13: 9780865478954

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Anselme was born Daniel Rabinovitch in 1927, and adopted the name Anselme while serving in the French Resistance with his father. Anselme traveled widely as a journalist, and was known as a raconteur and a habitué of Left Bank cafés. A vocal protester of France's war with Algeria, he addressed the war in On Leave (1957), his first novel. Anselme published a second novel, Relations, in 1964; ran the journal Les Cahiers de Mai from 1968 to 1974; and was one of the leaders of Solidarity Radio in Paris in 1981–82. He published a semiautobiographical account of his wartime experiences called The Secret Companion in 1984, and died five years later in Paris. David Bellos is the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, where he is also a professor of French and comparative literature. He is the author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (Faber, 2011). Bellos has won many awards for his translations, including the Man Booker International Prize for translation. He received the Prix Goncourt for his biography of Georges Perec and has also written biographies of Jacques Tati and Romain Gary.

Reviews

Three soldiers have a week’s leave from their service in the French army in the war in Algeria, but in Paris they find that their presence is an unpleasant reminder of the sad fate of many veterans who were abandoned by their countrymen. Private Lasteyrie has yet to tell his father he was demoted. Sergeant Lachaume learns his wife has left him. Corporal Valette, “son and heir” of a family of committed Communists, has lost his sense of himself. The heart of the novel is a party at Valette’s home that Lachaume attends. Neither Lachaume nor Valette can sustain the illusion of bonhomie, and their final night is spent wandering the streets and drinking. “In short, they needed a particular image of low and desperate life to help them overcome their own distaste for life.” Born in 1927, Anselme joined the French Resistance as a teenager, and after the war he worked as a reporter. On Leave was his first novel. Translator David Bellos, who has written an excellent introduction, has done well to save this dark novel from obscurity. --Michael Autrey

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865478953
• ISBN 13: 9780865478954
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224