The Law - Hardcover

Roger Vailland

3.58

81 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224607359 ISBN 13: 9780224607353

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1958

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RO60142231. THE LAW. 1958. In-8. Reli�. Bon �tat, Couv. convenable, Dos satisfaisant, Int�rieur acceptable. 255 pages. Tranche en t�te verte. Tranche l�g�rement pass�e et annot�e (feutre). Jaquette l�g�rement pass�e.. Avec Jaquette. . . Classification Dewey : 420-Langue anglaise. Anglo-saxon

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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 Ren� 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 Interalli� 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�Humanit� 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.

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