JEAN GIONO'S PAGE: Fragments of a Paradise & Occupation Journal & Ennemonde

OCCUPATION JOURNAL
JEAN GIONO (tr. Jody Gladding)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A captivating literary and historical record, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal offers a glimpse into life in collaborationist France during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes and thoughts of one of France's greatest and most independent writers.

Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during one of the country's darkest hours. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s—a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation—Giono spent the war in the village of Contadour in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his consumptive daughter. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions. Giono recounts the details of his life with fierce independence of thought and novelistic attention to character and dialogue.

Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature's most voracious and critical minds.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Knowing that these quotidian topics of no great interest are Author Giono's middle-of-WWII maunderings while his pacifist life was under the Vichy apparatus of Nazi occupation's close scrutiny makes them fascinating. It's a universal truth that life goes on, kids need clothes and meals and trips to the doctor. Author Giono navigates his way around every obstacle with his money and his persistence and his connections. Being in the toils of legal proceedings for his well-documented lifelong pacifism meant he was never a serious threat who needed close custody. Left to read and write, though subject to censorship, Author Giono writes unselfconsciously in these journal pages (always intended to remain private) of his process as a writer, his frank assessment of other writers' work, and the people of the village of Contadour.

It reminded me that the evergreen thought experiment "whatever you're doing now is what you'd be doing under Nazi occupation" makes one stop short and think hard for a reason. Author Giono took his privilege as a reason to spread the good fortune around: he never has any cash, and owes the government a pile of money, all because he's supporting his whole family...nine people in total...as well as bankrolling the escapes of those who are at lethal risk from that government he owes so much money to.

Using "their" money to keep "them" from committing murder against people whose morals he shared. Full marks, sir. And he did not stop there. He completed six novels (translated another...oh, there were plays too!) during the German occupation. Author Giono was a truly inspiring example of how to live a morally good life in bad times and under dark circumstances.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


FRAGMENTS OF A PARADISE
JEAN GIONO (tr. Paul Eprile)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Giono’s prose is a singularly fine blend of realism and poetic sensibility.” — The Washington Post Giono’s very own Moby-Dick, a sensational maritime journey that follows a crew inwards on a spiritual tale of evocative sea-glimpses

An allegorical critique of modern civilization and the damages of war, Giono’s oft-overlooked seafaring tale sweeps the reader along a narrative as poetic and undulating as the wind, tacking between the sea’s mysteries and the intricacies of the men’s conversations and inner thoughts as they attempt to grasp the sensory reality around them.

“I no longer have any interest in living under the conditions that this era allows,” writes the Captain of L’Indien, a ship whose radio remains packed in a crate in the hold. The men aboard won’t be needing it; they have no interest in connecting with the world of ordinary men. With enough provisions to last them five years, they set sail in July of 1940 for the South Seas, leaving civilization behind in search of the unknown.

Hastening onwards, Giono’s men steer deeper into themselves, seeking a purpose beyond the “world in upheaval” they left behind—a moving and spiritual work written by one of Europe’s most ardent 20th-century pacifists.

A sensational novel that delves into the unknown reaches of the sea and soul, perfect for readers seeking a poetic escape that challenges the political and social status-quo.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Really, do I even need to say it?

This read was a beacon of psychic coolness in a summer beset by wildfires, smoke particles, and the looming, ugly threat of super-El Niño to come with its heat and its drought. It's beautiful, as one would expect from a writer of Author Giono's stature, sentences making images that endure on the eye the nose the ear of the mind as the men on this sailing ship leave their families and friends behind to fight their war, rebuild their world, however they like.

No one who leaves the world does so without leaving others behind.

It's beautiful until the thought, "you have provisions for FIVE YEARS and you left a literal WAR ZONE to escape into a cosmic search for love, truth, and beauty?!" hits.

Stay there and use that magical power to feed hungry wounded orphaned victims.

Yes yes yes, it's a fable, an unreality meant to instruct and to offer guidance on one's search for Meaning, all very well. Author Giono was a pacifist who was punished for opposing the Vichy regime...see above for his journals in review...but this kind of navel-gazing is for the time leading up to war, in an attempt to forestall the slide; this tale appeared in 1948, as the rebuilding of the continent was gathering steam. That was the moment to support peaceful action not hightailing it off to sea to have cool adventures.

Anyway. Beautiful sentences, we're not rebuilding stuff (though we should be), so read and enjoy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


ENNEMONDE
JEAN GIONO (tr. Bill Johnston)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One of the final novellas by the acclaimed French writer Jean Giono, Ennemonde is a fierce and jubilant portrait of a life intensely lived

Ennemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Razor-sharp. Loving mother and murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High Country, where vengeance is an art form, hearts are superfluous, and only boldness and cunning such as Ennemonde’s can win the day. A gleeful, broad sardonic grin of a novel.

"Roads move cautiously around the High Country..." So begins the story of Ennemonde, but also of her sons, daughters, neighbors, lovers, and enemies, and especially of the mountains that stand guard behind their home in the Camargue. This is a place of stark and terrifying beauty, where violence strikes suddenly, whether from the hand of a neighbor or from the sky itself.

Giono captures every wrinkle, glare, and glance with wry delight, celebrating the uniquely tough people whose eyes sparkle with the cruel majesty of the landscape. Full of delectable detours and startling insights, Ennemonde will take you by the hand for an unforgettable tour of this master novelist's singular world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not remotely comfortable reading, Giono using this female body's looks and size as commentary on her character and morality. Perfectly ordinary in its time; sixtyish years ago people said terribly cruel things about those larger than, or in any way divergent from, "average."

The young women, while they're still maidens, possess a fruit-like beauty; then the beauty bursts, and fragments of it can be seen in their children. Truly nothing remains of these women's former state. Some Venuses turn into fearsome monsters; almost all of them have seventeenth-century mouths, toothless or, even worse, with a handful of loose teeth on which they suck. It's pretty ghastly. But their simple-minded appearance shouldn't be taken at face value. Almost all of them are commanding women. With their back to the wall they achieve wonders. People still remember Ennemonde Girard.

It does not hit the same register in 2026 as it did in 1968, when it first appeared. It feels false, hostile, spoken for effect in the #MeToo world.

There's probably a good reason for that: the French are not so terribly far from the US despite their fantasies:

The tool that people around here have most often in their hand is a shotgun, whether it’s for hunting or for, let’s say, philosophical reflection; in either case, there’s no solution without a shot being fired...
–and–
The Protestants of these parts had since time immemorial protested against Protestantism. They’d ended up worshipping anything at all, so long as the anything at all demanded intolerance. Crown of thorns were consumed in every household, at every meal. Religion was a sort of commerce in which discomfort was always preferred to joy, scorn to pleasure, and ultimately vice to virtue.

"These parts" are Author Giono's native Provençal mountains, where he lived his life.

It's not so weird after all, fellow intolerant lefties; humans been MAGAts a long damn time.

I can't claim to love this story, I can't tell if it's because I'm a judgmental old man or I'm just a product of the times that brought this novella (150pp barely) into being, holding its subjects up for a cold-eyed considering examination. Author Giono does not vouchsafe a verdict; I do.

Me no likee.

THE DIRECTOR, living life through extraordinary times demands a lot from an artist

THE DIRECTOR
DANIEL KEHLMANN (tr. Ross Benjamin)
Summit Books/S&S (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2026 International Booker Prize shortlistee!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Georg Wilhelm Pabst (25 August 1885 – 29 May 1967) lived an unlucky life. He was trapped in his native Europe for each of the World Wars fought there. His work...impressive stuff...is almost totally forgotten outside the small world of cinéastes. (Do you know anyone, apart from me, who's seen The Threepenny Opera and/or L'Atlantide?) We're treated here to a deep fictional dive into his inner workings. Given that he already knew Nazism was wrong, bad, and evil, and was trying to escape its miasma, his decision to collaborate with Goebbels in the propaganda machine seems inexcusable. In fact it was never forgiven. Not even his German-language film The Last Act (The Last Ten Days in English) bought him back his prior-to-collaboration esteem in spite of its honest treatment of Hitler's insanity at the end of the war.

What price security. It cost this security-seeker very dear. His only son was swallowed by the Hitler Youth because his father returned to see if he could care for his ailing mother. He is examined in this novel as only fiction is capable of examining an inner life. It's not the justifications and self-delusion that a memoir could bring to the table. It's the decisions he made writ plain and unadorned with the inevitable dishonesty of making excuses.

Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director.

I don't think a man who could meet with and work for Nazis could've brought himself to conjure those honest, self-deprecating words.

I'm new to Kehlmann's work. This kind of spotlight is not flattering to its object. It can easily become a hatchet-job or hagiography; each is distorted and ultimately dishonest. In Author Kehlmann's choice of fictionalizing events and people very close to precisely aligned with the historical record, he puts the dishonesty and ambiguity on whom it belongs: Pabst. It's just...disturbing, and in a way a biography, a memoir would not be because Author Kehlmann clearly knows the facts and has an opinion yet makes us, the audience, take in our responses without the comfort of distancing our responses.

Would any one of the readers of this book behaved differently than Pabst? The fictional framing strips away the fig-leaf of "objectivity" so we must sit in the decisive moments with Pabst. Are you sure your illusion of yourself as a resister is accurate? Are you sure your judgment of what you'll need to give up is accurate? Are you sure you can be in, but not of, the system you scorn and abhor?

Translator Ross Benjamin did a good enough job rendering the read into English that I was a bit surprised to realize it was a translation. That is, to me, a very high compliment, or intended as one at least. It is a feat of writing to fictionalize someone who's famous (if you know who he is) in the light that emphasizes who he was; an equal feat to take that unusual choice to a very high level of craft in a different language. Kudos to both artists for a job well done.

Why, if I'm praising this work so highly and with such fervor, am I not offering all five stars? Because at no time was I transported into a different awareness, a space of timeless immanence such as I was by Evil Genius or The Remembered Soldier. It's all too rare, that removal from mundanity, so this is not a knock on the quality of the read. I'm impressed and I'm edified and I'm involved by this novel. It's at the top of the literary heap. It deserves its International Booker nomination. I'm not going to put in my pantheon but I'm going to urge it on you as a fascinating, timely, well-crafted story.

THE PROPAGANDIST, a careful personal inquiry into that weird addiction, Hate (with a capital-H)

THE PROPAGANDIST
CÉCILE DESPRAIRIES (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones.

Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very much like My Dinner with Andre, only French and about Nazi collaborators, in their own damning words.

What a book to write from one's own experiences. I'm amazed she was not more vilified, as it seems her brother had the most powerful negative response to publishing what amounts to the filthiest of dirty laundry. The author "is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. She is the author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime. Born in Paris in 1957, The Propagandist is her first novel," though certainly not her first book (publisher's provided biographical info). I think my favorite title of hers is "Ville Lumière, Années Noirs" or roughly "City of Light in Years of Darkness" about the Nazi occupation. I wish someone would translate it because my days of slugging through big honkin' books in French are gone.

Lucie, the Propagandist of the title, was married to an Aryan named Friedrich before the convenient marriage to the narrator's rich father. It was Friedrich, the One True Love of Lucie's life and an early eugenics researcher, who formed the future matriarch's attitudes ever after. Lucie and her female relatives all use the corruption of French legal and social systems (this is the land of the Dreyfus Affair and the LePens' evil racism, recall) to benefit materially from the vanishing and lack of return of Parisian Jews.

Probably the best time I had reading about these vile people as they sat around discussing their necrotic morality was the details of how exactly the collaborators accomplished this feat of theft. "Listening" to them as they bemoaned being called collaborators and spewed hatred was, frankly, unpleasant. It's a lot like people in the US not protesting ICEstapo's disappearing of people the scum risen to the top don't like. If you're wondering what those "good Germans" and ordinary French collaborators thought of just sitting back and not speaking out, look in a mirror.

The last third of the book dragged past me. The horrified fascination of learning what these entitled sleazebags got up to in order to hide from justice while keeping their ill-got gains wore off; the stars fell from my eyes and my rating. The absence of a central conflict got to me at last. I can't help but praise the author and the book, while tutting over the story as a story.

What I want to say and do at this passage in US political history is very much what the author has done here: Hold an unsparing mirror to the inner workings of "good people" who make excuses for their inaction. Its consequences are real. The Gestapo, loyal only to The Leader, and constrained by no laws, is operating now.

What are you doing to resist it? Are you sitting in your comfy world tutting? At least sending money to help refugees somewhere? Anything? Or are you these detestable Parisian ladies' spiritual descendant?