"To have lived to the full, to have loved, to have fought, to have killed: that is a man's life. And even though the price be death, it would be cheap at that." As chronicled in this extraordinary memoir, André Spada (1897 - 1935), the infamous Corsican bandit known as the "King of the Maquis," embodied a complex amalgam not only of Good and Evil but also of contrary emotions and perceptions. These include compassion and kindness as well as those cold-blooded instincts that eclipse the humanity of those driven by abject criminality. Thus, we have the "two Spadas." But beyond the idiosyncratic biography of a particular individual, it's through this confession that we gain entrée to a uniquely structured demimonde: the world of honorable bandits known as the Maquisards, constructed upon a rigid set of codes. Part of that pledge is to never betray their leader, even when a steep price is placed on his head. And even after a French expeditionary force is sent into Corsica with the sole purpose of rooting out the bandits. The military contingent is composed of tanks, planes, mountain artillery, a cannon, explosives, armored cars, field kitchens, and 1,400 troops; yet they fail to capture Spada and are eventually withdrawn. But a police campaign finally succeeds in forcing Spada out of his lair and driving him across the island. Available for the first time since 1935, this annotated edition features an in-depth Afterword by literary author Rob Couteau.
ROB COUTEAU is a Brooklyn-born author and visual artist. His publications have been praised in Evergreen Review, Publishers Weekly, New Art Examiner, Midwest Book Review, and Witty Partition. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. His work has been cited in books such as Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Tyrone Simpson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury edited by Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen's Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless. His interviews include conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Justin Kaplan, Last Exit to Brooklyn novelist Hubert Selby, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, Picasso's model and muse Sylvette David, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, film star and bibliophile Neil Pearson, and historian Philip Willan, author Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. Couteau has appeared as a guest on Bob Barrett's The Best of Our Knowledge (WAMC), Len Osanic's Black Op Radio, and on Monocle 24 in Europe. In 2023 he published Intimate Souvenirs, a memoir featuring an Introduction by Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita and Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War. Since 2020 he has devoted himself to republishing annotated texts of important but forgotten authors such as Stanley Marks, Charles Beadle, and Francis Carco.
