Love in the Days of Rage

Love in the Days of Rage is a work of lyricism and commitment, painting and politics, passion and intellect—a work to set beside the great expatriate novels of earlier generations.

“The more I make love, the more I want revolution; the more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.” In Paris, in May of 1968, revolution, and love are very much in the air. The barricades are going up, the students of the Sorbonne are taking to streets alive with the graffiti of revolt, and the Odeon is ablaze with speechmaking. For Annie, a young American painter, and Julian, her Portuguese lover, a banker and anarchist, the events of that Paris spring form the backdrop against which their love affair is played. Annie sees the world through an artist's eyes; she is reckless in her passions, wanting and needing love with other people. There is none of this fanciful nonsense for Julian, an anarchist disdainful of the entire human race, who thinks even the enraged students storming the streets of Paris with their posters proclaiming “open the windows of your heart” and “revolution is the ecstasy of history” to be hopelessly naive and sheeplike. Ferlinghetti charts the progress of love unfolding against those heady and momentous days when the pampered children of the bourgeoisie tried to find common cause with workers who despised them, “when Julian and Annie were in the heat of their love and reason.”

Ferlinghetti's first work of fiction since his surrealist novel Her reads like an old manuscript that he pulled out of a desk drawer and reworked. Written in flowing, poetic sentences and endlessly long paragraphs, this mercifully short love story is set in the summer of 1968 in Paris, where New York painter Annie is having an affair with Julian Mendes, a well-heeled banker claiming to be a closet anarchist. They take meals in restaurants, have sex, and talk, talk, talk about revolution and love. When student protests erupt, Julian proves to Annie that he's not a hypocrite by involving her in a vague looting scheme. It may be true, as poet Ferlinghetti implies, that the global protest wave of '68 presaged today's Green Movement, yet even if one sympathizes with his politics, it's hard to take these self-absorbed romantics seriously. The Parisian atmosphere is convincing, but the pretty writing occasionally veers off into Beat prose-poem monologues that would read better if set as free verse.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ferlinghetti is best known as a poet ( A Coney Island of the Mind ) and as publisher of City Lights Books. His first novel, Her , a surreal quest for the ideal woman, achieved a small cult following in the Sixties. This short novel is more realistic, treating the love affair of Annie, a young American artist in Paris, and anarchist banker Julien Mendeswith the 1968 student revolt as backdrop. Primarily a novel of ideas, more French than American in concept, this book is full of political debate, symbolism, and literary allusions. The love story itself achieves meaning only in relation to larger social concepts such as capitalism, anarchism, and freedom. A lyrical, poetic work that will appeal to a small, though sophisticated, audience. Recommended. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.