Romain Gary: The Greatest Literary Conman? | Hacker News Reader

Romain Gary: The Greatest Literary Conman?

bbc.com

29 pointssamclemens10 comments

> In the past decade, his reputation has shown signs of renewed vigour.

I haven't seen anything like this "renewed vigour" in France. There was a TV documentary and an exposition in Paris for the 30th anniversary of its death in 2010, but even that went quite unnoticed. Romain Gary is still known today mostly for his trickery as Émile Ajar, and because some of its books are sometimes studied in school.

For the first time this year, I met someone who placed Romain Gary in his personal Pantheon. But I suspect his fan base is very small, unlike contemporaneous authors like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who also had a heroic life) or Boris Vian (who also published under pseudonyms).

When I read "La vie devant soi" (The Life Before Us) as a late teenager, I thought it was a good but not great book, with lovable characters. A bit too lovable maybe, because it felt too nice and too sympathetic on all these marginal characters with a lack of anything deeper. But I think much worse of the three Romain Gary novels I've read since then. I feel he's always trying to be smart, to impress the reader. He can write a touching scene and break it for a witty word.

> In fact, when he was living in LA, he wrote in English, rebelling against slyly anti-Semitic criticism that he used the French language improperly.

I've never read anything about this, I'd be interested in the source. Romain Gary wrote "Lady L." in English in 1958, but he soon translated it himself to French, so I fail to see any kind of rebellion against the French language in this.

The text isn't clear on who thought these criticisms were "slyly anti-Semitic". R.G. did arrive in France at 14, so any language mistake on his part would be logically related to this personal past more than his family religion. Moreover, I can't imagine any prominent criticism with anti-semitic subtitle in the late 50s in France.

I don't know. Some of my friends are die hard fans. I really liked la vie devant soi and adieu Gary Cooper.

Gary was superfluous and needlessly impressive, he owned it, confessed it, and wrote its marvelous onthogenesis (la promesse de l'aube), it seems strange to blame him for the lack of depth - it's his point.

Also, could you please advise me some deep french novels, written after WWII? I've read and loved plenty of Camus and l'ecume des jours, but can't stand stalinists, so wouldn't touch Gide, Sartre etc.

Gide was communist for about 5 years, and when he discovered what life in the USSR really was, he wrote a pamphlet that caused him many troubles with his former friends. Anyway, I recommend "Les faux-monnayeurs" if you can forget Gide's personal flaws.

One last word on Gary: he did try to add depth to some of its novels. In "Clair de femmes", he portrays people living after the death of their loved ones. A few times, I felt empathy for the characters, but more than often the writer added some kind of witty "special effects" that completely broke the mood.

Now for the advice for deep French novels:

- Marguerite Yourcenar, "Les mémoires d'Hadrien", "L'œuvre au noir" - Vercors, "Les animaux dénaturés" - Julien Gracq, "Le rivage des Syrtes" (only if you enjoy reading sophisticated French) - Drieu La rochelle, "Gilles" (if you can disregard the author's political views) - Robe-Grillet, "La jalousie" - Joseph Kessel, "Les cavaliers" - Tournier, "Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique" - Roger Martin du Gard, "Jean Barois" (a little known novel showing the intellectual life in France at the beginning of the 20th century), "Les Thibault" (if you like long saga and can stand a character that became engrossed with the ideal of socialism) (I know I'm cheating with the request, this was written before WWII).

This is of course a very personal choice, and I did not list famous authors I haven't enjoyed, like M. Duras or G. Perec.

Thank you very much, that's way more than I hoped for!

To clarify, I don't necceserily hate communists, I can't stand apology of cannibalism even allegedly repented.

"Moreover, I can't imagine any prominent criticism with anti-semitic subtitle in the late 50s in France."

france in the 50s still hadn't had a deep look in the in the atrocities of the collaboration, and as an example maurice papon was Paris chief of police under de gaulle. antisemitism wasn't the main focus and it was still very common for people to make horrible comments on jews out in the open ( ask any jew that studied in Paris in the 60s). France really took a strong stance against antisemitism and racism in everyday life much much later.

In the 50s and 60s the main concern was to rebuild the country and reach political stability. Racism and antisemitism were really not.

Of course antisemitism didn't magically disappear after the war, but I don't think that's relevant, because it had disappeared from the main media and the intellectual circles. Even when Poujade and Le Pen briefly gave antisemitism a new public voice at the end of the 50s, it was in the margins of politics, and it had no impact on the literary circles. An historian specialized on this, Tal Bruttmann, wrote that « après-guerre, l'antisémitisme n'avait pas bonne presse. »

Romain Gary was living in Los Angeles when he began writing in English. Being a diplomat, he had lived the five previous years mostly in New York and London. So if he really felt an antisemitic criticism of his works was widely shared in France, I think it could only come from the newspapers or from other writers.

Adam Gopnik wrote about Romain Gary in the New Yorker six months ago. Gopnik's article is a nice companion piece to this one:

The Made-Up Man https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-made-up-ma... The writer Romain Gary was an inveterate fabulist. But his work is sustained by an authentic moral vision.

> The writer Romain Gary was an inveterate fabulist.

So he was writing up his life as well. :)

On the subject of forgotten authors, during the eighties I read most of A.J.Cronin's books. He was one of my preferred authors. He was very famous when he was alive but now it seems he is almost entirely forgotten. Are there other people in this forum who read his books?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com