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  • Published: 19 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781939810564
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Occupation Journal



A captivating literary and historical record, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal offers a glimpse into life in collaborationist France during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes and thoughts of one of France's greatest and most independent writers.

Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during one of the country's darkest hours. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s--a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation--Giono spent the war in the village of Contadour in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his consumptive daughter. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions. Giono recounts the details of his life with fierce independence of thought and novelistic attention to character and dialogue. Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature's most voracious and critical minds.

  • Published: 19 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781939810564
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

About the author

Jean Giono

Jean Giono was born in 1895 in Manosque, Provence, and lived there most of his life. He supported his family working as a bank clerk for eighteen years before his first two novels were published, thanks to the generosity of André Gide, to critical acclaim. He went on to write thirty novels, including The Horseman on the Roof, and numerous essays and stories. In 1953, the year in which he wrote The Man who Planted Trees, he was awarded the Prix Monégasque for his collective work. Jean Giono died in October 1970.

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Praise for Occupation Journal

   • "For Giono, literature and reality overlap the way that waves sweep over the shore, one ceaselessly refreshing the other and, in certain wondrous moments, giving it a glassy clearness."--Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic    • "Giono's voice is the voice of the realist; his accents are the accents of simplicity, power and a passionate feeling for a land and a people that he must love as well as understand."--The New York Times