A01=Jean Guehenno
Author_Jean Guehenno
B06=David Ball
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DNBH1
Category=NHD
Category=NHWL
Category=NHWR7
Category=NL-BG
Category=NL-HB
COP=United States
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
ISBN13=9780190495848
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20160815
POP=New York
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
PUB=Oxford University Press Inc
SMM=23
Subject=Biography: General
Subject=History
WG=460
WMM=157
Product details
- ISBN 9780190495848
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 155 x 231 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 08 Sep 2016
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: New York, US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Nonfiction
Jean Guéhenno's Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1945 is the most oft-quoted piece of testimony on life in occupied France. A sharply observed record of day-to-day life under Nazi rule in Paris and a bitter commentary on literary life in those years, it has also been called "a remarkable essay on courage and cowardice" (Caroline Moorehead, Wall Street Journal). Here, David Ball provides not only the first English-translation of this important historical document, but also the first ever annotated, corrected edition.
Guéhenno was a well-known political and cultural critic, left-wing but not communist, and uncompromisingly anti-fascist. Unlike most French writers during the Occupation, he refused to pen a word for a publishing industry under Nazi control. He expressed his intellectual, moral, and emotional resistance in this diary: his shame at the Vichy government's collaboration with Nazi Germany, his contempt for its falsely patriotic reactionary ideology, his outrage at its anti-Semitism and its vilification of the Republic it had abolished, his horror at its increasingly savage repression and his disgust with his fellow intellectuals who kept on blithely writing about art and culture as if the Occupation did not exist - not to mention those who praised their new masters in prose and poetry. Also a teacher of French literature, he constantly observed the young people he taught, sometimes saddened by their conformism but always passionately trying to inspire them with the values of the French cultural tradition he loved. Guéhenno's diary often includes his own reflections on the great texts he is teaching, instilling them with special meaning in the context of the Occupation. Complete with meticulous notes and a biographical index, Ball's edition of Guéhenno's epic diary offers readers a deeper understanding not only of the diarist's cultural allusions, but also of the dramatic, historic events through which he lived.
Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual.; David Ball is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature, Smith College.
