On Leave

Product Description

It is December 1956 and three soldiers - a sergeant, a corporal and a private - are on leave in Paris. As they make their way through the city, drinking, gambling and raging against a war they're forced to fight in a faraway place, they come to realize they are strangers in their own country. Lachaume, the middle-class intellectual, is estranged from his wife and unrecognizable to his bourgeois friends. Valette, a Communist, feels betrayed by his party, while the streetwise rebel Lasteyrie just wants to pick up a girl who'll help him forget. What they have to say about the things they've seen can't be heard; can't even be spoken.

On Leave, published in 1957 as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, vividly describes the shame, isolation and terror felt by men returning from an unpopular war. With no outcome to the conflict in sight, the book's power to disturb was too much to bear and it disappeared from view. Now, through David Bellos's translation, this lost classic has been rediscovered. Spare, forceful and full of feeling, informed by the many hours Daniel Anselme spent talking to conscripts in Paris, On Leave is a searing evocation of what it means to be a soldier. It also enriches our sense of how France contended with one of the darkest moments of its postwar history.