
Romain Gary: The Greatest Literary Conman? - samclemens
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180619-romain-gary-the-greatest-literary-bad-boy-of-all
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idoubtit
> In the past decade, his reputation has shown signs of renewed vigour.

I haven't seen anything like this "renewed vigour" in France. There was a TV
documentary and an exposition in Paris for the 30th anniversary of its death
in 2010, but even that went quite unnoticed. Romain Gary is still known today
mostly for his trickery as Émile Ajar, and because some of its books are
sometimes studied in school.

For the first time this year, I met someone who placed Romain Gary in his
personal Pantheon. But I suspect his fan base is very small, unlike
contemporaneous authors like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who also had a heroic
life) or Boris Vian (who also published under pseudonyms).

When I read "La vie devant soi" (The Life Before Us) as a late teenager, I
thought it was a good but not great book, with lovable characters. A bit too
lovable maybe, because it felt too nice and too sympathetic on all these
marginal characters with a lack of anything deeper. But I think much worse of
the three Romain Gary novels I've read since then. I feel he's always trying
to be smart, to impress the reader. He can write a touching scene and break it
for a witty word.

> In fact, when he was living in LA, he wrote in English, rebelling against
> slyly anti-Semitic criticism that he used the French language improperly.

I've never read anything about this, I'd be interested in the source. Romain
Gary wrote "Lady L." in English in 1958, but he soon translated it himself to
French, so I fail to see any kind of rebellion against the French language in
this.

The text isn't clear on who thought these criticisms were "slyly anti-
Semitic". R.G. did arrive in France at 14, so any language mistake on his part
would be logically related to this personal past more than his family
religion. Moreover, I can't imagine any prominent criticism with anti-semitic
subtitle in the late 50s in France.

~~~
bsaul
"Moreover, I can't imagine any prominent criticism with anti-semitic subtitle
in the late 50s in France."

france in the 50s still hadn't had a deep look in the in the atrocities of the
collaboration, and as an example maurice papon was Paris chief of police under
de gaulle. antisemitism wasn't the main focus and it was still very common for
people to make horrible comments on jews out in the open ( ask any jew that
studied in Paris in the 60s). France really took a strong stance against
antisemitism and racism in everyday life much much later.

In the 50s and 60s the main concern was to rebuild the country and reach
political stability. Racism and antisemitism were really not.

~~~
idoubtit
Of course antisemitism didn't magically disappear after the war, but I don't
think that's relevant, because it had disappeared from the main media and the
intellectual circles. Even when Poujade and Le Pen briefly gave antisemitism a
new public voice at the end of the 50s, it was in the margins of politics, and
it had no impact on the literary circles. An historian specialized on this,
Tal Bruttmann, wrote that « après-guerre, l'antisémitisme n'avait pas bonne
presse. »

Romain Gary was living in Los Angeles when he began writing in English. Being
a diplomat, he had lived the five previous years mostly in New York and
London. So if he really felt an antisemitic criticism of his works was widely
shared in France, I think it could only come from the newspapers or from other
writers.

------
simulate
Adam Gopnik wrote about Romain Gary in the New Yorker six months ago. Gopnik's
article is a nice companion piece to this one:

The Made-Up Man [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-made-up-
ma...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-made-up-man) The
writer Romain Gary was an inveterate fabulist. But his work is sustained by an
authentic moral vision.

~~~
frandroid
> The writer Romain Gary was an inveterate fabulist.

So he was writing up his life as well. :)

------
asimeqi
On the subject of forgotten authors, during the eighties I read most of
A.J.Cronin's books. He was one of my preferred authors. He was very famous
when he was alive but now it seems he is almost entirely forgotten. Are there
other people in this forum who read his books?

