Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.
OK, Joe!" the American lieutenant calls out to his driver. He hops into his jeep and heads out through French countryside just liberated from the Nazis. With him is the narrator of this novel, Louis, a Frenchman engaged by the American Army as an interpreter. Louis serves a group of American officers charged with bringing GIs to account for crimes—including rape and murder—against French citizens. The friendly banter of the American soldiers and the beautiful Breton landscape stand in contrast to Louis's task and his growing awareness of the moral failings of the Americans sent to liberate France. For not only must Louis translate the accounts of horrific crimes, he comes to realize that the accused men are almost all African American. Based on diaries that the author kept during his service as a translator for the U.S. Army in the aftermath of D-Day, OK, Joe follows Louis and the Americans as they negotiate with witnesses, investigate the crimes, and stage the courts-martial. Guilloux has an uncanny ear for the snappy speech of the GIs and a tenderness for the young, unworldly men with whom he spends his days, and, in evocative vignettes and dialogues, he sketches the complex intersection of hope and disillusionment that prevailed after the war. Although the American presence in France has been romanticized in countless books and movies, OK, Joe offers something exceedingly rare: a penetrating French perspective on post-D-Day GI culture, a chronicle of trenchant racism and lost ideals.
Jean-Louis Coatrieux a croisé sur sa route Aragon, Neruda, Guillevic grâce à son professeur de philosophie, Jean Marcenac, par ailleurs poète lui-même et biographe d’Aragon. Puis d'autres écrivains comme Georges Perros, Philippe de Boissy et Charles Le Quintrec. "In absentia" poursuit un dialogue commencé dans "À les entendre parler" avec ses amis écrivains, Xavier Grall, Guillevic, Louis Guilloux, Georges Perros, Armand Robin, Victor Segalen. Ce sont cette fois Federico Garcia Lorca, Nazim Hikmet et Pablo Neruda. « Lorca, Hikmet, Neruda seraient-ils des poètes trop tentés d’agrandir le monde ? Des victimes de causes entendues dans un autre siècle dont nous n’avons aujourd’hui nul besoin ? Loin de leur écrire une fin d’histoire dont ils n’auront pas été les auteurs ou de leur coller aux corps comme s’ils étaient encore vivants, quelque chose dans le présent ne cède rien à tous ceux qui souffrent de creuser encore les blancs et les silences, dans ces mots où simplement vivre et prendre une résidence sur terre, inconnue ou étrangère. Alors, que ce soit sous les séquoias, les érables ou les cèdres, tous ces arbres de feu, le sommeil est impossible. » Jean-Louis Coatrieux Ils en parlent... « Au-delà des grands sculpteurs de mots que furent ces trois grands écrivains, c’est bien aux résistants qu’il voue donc son admiration. Résistance : le fil rouge de trois itinéraires. Et résister aujourd’hui, pour Jean-Louis Coatrieux, commence par se réapproprier des auteurs pour qui « le monde n’était pas tel qu’il était, mais comme ils voulaient le créer, libre, lumineux, insolent ». S’il surligne la puissance littéraire – et révolutionnaire- du trio Hikmet, Lorca, Neruda, c’est aussi pour mieux pointer l’insignifiance de certains écrits actuels et pour fustiger « le brouhaha littéraire » ou la « lessive des idées » dans une vie « de plus en plus colonisée par le bref, la pulsion, la vague du moment ». Son petit livre est, à cet égard, une belle remise à plat et une invitation à revenir – comme l’on dit – aux fondamentaux. » Pierre Tanguy
Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.
OK, Joe!" the American lieutenant calls out to his driver. He hops into his jeep and heads out through French countryside just liberated from the Nazis. With him is the narrator of this novel, Louis, a Frenchman engaged by the American Army as an interpreter. Louis serves a group of American officers charged with bringing GIs to account for crimes—including rape and murder—against French citizens. The friendly banter of the American soldiers and the beautiful Breton landscape stand in contrast to Louis's task and his growing awareness of the moral failings of the Americans sent to liberate France. For not only must Louis translate the accounts of horrific crimes, he comes to realize that the accused men are almost all African American. Based on diaries that the author kept during his service as a translator for the U.S. Army in the aftermath of D-Day, OK, Joe follows Louis and the Americans as they negotiate with witnesses, investigate the crimes, and stage the courts-martial. Guilloux has an uncanny ear for the snappy speech of the GIs and a tenderness for the young, unworldly men with whom he spends his days, and, in evocative vignettes and dialogues, he sketches the complex intersection of hope and disillusionment that prevailed after the war. Although the American presence in France has been romanticized in countless books and movies, OK, Joe offers something exceedingly rare: a penetrating French perspective on post-D-Day GI culture, a chronicle of trenchant racism and lost ideals.
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The Republic of Haiti is a fascinating country of contrast where are joined together tradition and illiteracy, high religion and folk religion, light and darkness. It is a country ravaged by poverty and afflicted by a considerable social backwardness where people live in a constant fear of a heavy and gloomy threat which impregnates every fiber of the society in which they live: that of Voodoo. Through this captivating work, Dr. Andre J. Louis translates us into a world that most ordinary people would never even imagine the existence of such occultism where superstition, sorcery, magic, spiritism, divination, and animism combine all their strength in order to set up the background of the daily life of each Haitian, which, unfortunately, overwhelms him with a heavy weight of fear, economic bondage and uncertainty regarding his future.
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