On leave
By: Daniel Anselme ; translated from the French by David Bellos
Contributors: Bellos, David, translator
Edition: First American edition.
Publisher: Faber and Faber Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 198
ISBN-13: 9780865478954; 9780865478961
Subjects: Fiction; Soldiers; Psychic trauma; History
Work titles: Permission
Description: "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 Bello'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--
Notes: Includes an interview by Maurice Pons with the author (1957).

Ttanslation from the French of: Permission.