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Synopsis
The life of Guy de Roumegouse is one of imposture, of playing roles, and of being constantly untrue to himself. In retirement in the south of France, he begins to write his memoirs, and in doing so confronts the betrayals and dislocations that have shaped and warped his life. At the heart of Guy’s duplicity is the repression of his homosexuality during a time when the Vichy government controlled all in war-torn France. At an age when this young man was supposed to experience a sexual awakening, he instead went into hiding both physically and emotionally. This fictional memoir is elegantly crafted and told in a prose as cold and paradoxical as its narrator.
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About the Author
Frederic Raphael won an Oscar for his screenplay for Darling and cowrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. He is the author of Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick and Coast to Coast.
Reviews
Repressed histories, sexual and political, drive this brilliant and wrenching story of a man whose emotional response mechanism has been terminally misdirected. Shortly after Guy de Roumegouse--a bored French career diplomat, husband and father--retires, a colleague idly suggests that he write his memoirs. Guy's subsequent reflections chart his transformation from a shy and lonely boy into a walking cipher, a man devoid of true identity and passion. Experiencing puberty under Nazi occupation in rural France, Guy watches as his first love, a boy named Fritz, is deported by the Gestapo. His brief, pathetic protest (one of the few visceral responses in his life) results in his (pro-Vichy) parents "selling" him to the Resistance to deflect Nazi suspicion from their family. Guy is hidden in a farmhouse loft with another teenager, a hustler named F?lix who services German officers at the behest of the Resistance. Though he is drawn to F?lix, Guy cannot bring himself to act upon his feelings for fear of his would-be paramour's German contacts. Guy's reverie is not linear; he does not seem to take any pleasure in telling his tale nor, indeed, even care about the outcome. So this account of his formative wartime years is interspersed with the story of the tired dissolution of his first marriage and the cheerless beginning of his second; his visits to a Rome prostitute; his oddly cold flirtation with a Jewish Jesuit in Rome, whose dual nature intrigues him; and the pivotal experience of watching the public punishment of Vichy collaborators after the war, too little and too late. Author and screenwriter Raphael (Coast to Coast; Eyes Wide Shut) has created a novel to remember out of a dispassionate vacuum. The shallowness of Guy's affect, product in part of a wartime habit of deception and in part of something deeper, is alternately chilling and magnificently tragic. (May) FYI: A Double Life was originally published in the U.K. in 1993.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Raphael's latest novel purports to be the memoir of a French career diplomat, Guy de Roumegouse, whose whole life, which he relates in luxurious detail, has been consumed by his fascination with duplicity. "For as long as I can remember," Guy admits, "there has been an aspect of imposture in my personality." Eschewing a strict chronological timeline, Guy revisits his past, alternating his schooling years during France's occupation in World War II with more recent events, including his two marriages and certain episodes in his career. How appropriate that he would come of age hiding from authorities in Vichy, France, a state whose very existence was founded on political duplicity. How appropriate that he should go into diplomatic work, a field in which personal identity is rarely what it appears. How appropriate that his sexuality, too, reflects the same ambivalence as his personality. Raphael plays a brilliant game of Who is he? Who is he not? Brad Hooper
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A Double Life
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