The Law (Elond Classics) - Softcover

Vailland, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0907871119 ISBN 13: 9780907871118

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd, 1985

Synopsis

Now back in print, ROGER VAILLAND's atmospheric 1957 novel won the Prix Goncourt, and the Knopf edition was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The grotesque game of the Law, played in the taverns of southern Italy, is but a shadow of an even fiercer attitude to life--a potent metaphor for a vigorously hierarchical view of existence which rules over the mezzogiorno, the noonday culture of southern Italy. In this novel we are not asked to pardon or condemn the passion of Donna Lucrezia, the assured self-centeredness of the learned aristocrat Don Cesare or even the sinister desires of Matteo Brigante, the controlling godfather.

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Review

"Makes Mario Puzo's works look rather tame."

About the Author

Roger Vailland was born in 1907 into a prosperous bourgeois family in Acy-Le-Multier, Oise, France. From precocious schoolboy in Reims he went on to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale and took part in the Surrealist Movement with the Grand Jeu group, at the same time as Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and René Daumal.

From 1930 he worked as a journalist, covering stories throughout the world. Later he covered all the major trials for Paris-Soir, which proved an excellent preparation for his subsequent career as a novelist. During the resistance he was attached to the underground Gaullist movement and specialized in derailing trains. It was in 1944, while he was cut off from his contacts, shut up in an isolated farmhouse and armed to the teeth, that he wrote his first novel to while away the time. This was Drole de Jeu, which won the Prix Interallié in 1945. For the remainder of the war he served as a war-correspondent attached to the allied armies, and then devoted himself to writing novels and plays at his house in Ain. Work from this period, such as Les Mauvais Coups and L’Humanité placed him squarely in the ranks of the French left.

Disenchantment with his lifelong attachment to the Communist party began with the collapse of the Stalin myth in 1956. The subsequent invasion of Hungary by the Russian army completed his political break with the Left. Disillusioned, he retreated to Apulia in the remote south of Italy where he came up with his masterwork, La Loi. This marked a "significant renunciation of practically everything with which the French literary consciousness had hitherto linked him." (Keates). It also glows with his love for Apulia discovered during a series of journalistic expeditions in the 1950’s. It won the Prix Goncourt.

About this edition

• Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0907871119
• ISBN 13: 9780907871118
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288