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    On Leave: A Novel
    On Leave: A Novel
    On Leave: A Novel
    Ebook196 pages2 hours

    On Leave: A Novel

    By Daniel Anselme and David Bellos

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    About this ebook

    A long-lost French novel in which three soldiers return home from an unpopular, unspeakable war

    When On Leave was published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, it told people things they did not want to hear. It vividly described what it was like for soldiers to return home from an unpopular war in a faraway place. The book received a handful of reviews, it was never reprinted, it disappeared from view. With no outcome to the war in sight, its power to disturb was too much to bear.

    Through David Bellos's translation, this lost classic has been rediscovered. Spare, forceful, and moving, it describes a week in the lives of a sergeant, a corporal, and an infantryman, each home on leave in Paris. What these soldiers have to say can't be heard, can't even be spoken; they find themselves strangers in their own city, unmoored from their lives. Full of sympathy and feeling, informed by the many hours Daniel Anselme spent talking to conscripts in Paris, On Leave is a timeless evocation of what the history books can never record: the shame and the terror felt by men returning home from war.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 4, 2014
    ISBN9780865478961
    On Leave: A Novel
    Author

    Daniel Anselme

    Daniel Anselme was born Daniel Rabinovitch in 1927, and adopted the name Anselme while serving in the French Resistance with his father. Anselme traveled widely as a journalist, and was known as a raconteur and a habitué of Left Bank cafés. A vocal protester of France’s war with Algeria, he addressed the war in On Leave (1957), his first novel. Anselme published a second novel, Relations, in 1964; ran the journal Les Cahiers de Mai from 1968 to 1974; and was one of the leaders of Solidarity Radio in Paris in 1981–82. He published a semiautobiographical account of his wartime experiences called The Secret Companion in 1984, and died five years later in Paris.

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    • 4/5
      It was easy for me to relate to the premise for this short novel. I am the daughter of a man who was taken from his parent's home at age 18 and shipped to the South Pacific during WWII and found his adulthood amid the shocking horrors of war. This book tells of three servicemen who return home for a week's leave and the disfunctional relationships and abhorrent treatment they are subjected to from their families and countrymen. I saw this shameful treatment of our Vietnam Vets in my youth. Apathy is not an answer. When will it end? My thanks to the author, the translation and Goodreads for a complimentary copy of this work.

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    On Leave - Daniel Anselme

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