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La Loi
En observant les habitants d'une région du sud de l'Italie, Roger Vailland analyse les différentes classes qui composent une société, leurs querelles intestines, leurs interconnexions et leurs rivalités. Ses personnages, du plus riche au plus pauvre, du plus influent au plus opprimé, mènent un combat incessant pour gravir les échelons du pouvoir, pour assouvir leurs perversions ou pour survivre.
316 pages, Paperback
First published June 12, 1957
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 4, 2025
This is an amazing novel for the tale it tells, for what it says about how the world has changed but most importantly about how deep the roots of the present are in the past. Published in 1957, written by a disillusioned (please see my footnote *1 below) French left wing writer, it is startlingly free of ideological commitment and its clear eyed honest look at the foibles as well as the monstrosities of ordinary people. But interestingly there are no monsters. Both the man who says he likes to rape virgins and the virgin who sees off his attempts to rape are equally free of any morality. What he did, what she does (and I don't simply mean in resisting rape) are all tied up in the 'Law' which is both a particular game that is played in the local cafe but more importantly, of course, a metaphor for the entire way of life in Southern Italy and, with variations, the intellectual salons that Roger Vailland was disenchanted with in Paris.
What Vailland presents us with is a very clear eyed portrait of a small town and society that is a microcosm of the larger world. It is a world that utterly contradicts every cliched norm about Italy as Catholic, family orientated with a reverence for women and children. There is nothing but superstition, greed, petty enmity and hate as well as misogyny that is almost painful to read. It was also a society of people obsessed with status and money which meant more than any family and certainly any friend. There were complex webs of obligation, patronage and dependence but all rested on gradations of power. It was a world built on the horrible unchanging, unrelieved omnipresent poverty of most people. The irony is that it is not family, church or politics that bring change but simple unrestricted or controlled prosperity that is not given, or brought or controlled, only a tidal wave of consumerism.
Interestingly there is no mention of the Church - at the time this novel was written the Catholic Church was in the last days of its post war Byzantine glory as Pius XII moved about his pontifical realm in a cloud of waving peacock fans, incense and young boy choristers. Its obsession with women's clothing (ensuring it was copious and all concealing) was as absurd as it was irrelevant (see my footnote *2 below).
Like all novels that live beyond their time 'The Law' says much not only about Italy but about any other society that has facade that conceals much - and I say that as someone from Ireland, another country where love of family, children and supposed respect for women concealed exactly the opposite. The hypocrisies and unexamined prejudices at the root of this novel are not simply to be found in the way the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper and Dennis Nielsen in the UK were ignored, forgotten and belittled because labelled as prostitutes or rent boys.
A truly brilliant novel that examines human nature with an honesty that is both acute and astounding in its clear sighted acuity.
*1 Vailland was disillusioned with the pieties and hypocrisies of Communist politics after the Soviet suppression of dissent in first, East Germany, and then Hungary.
*2 I have no idea if the Pope or other Catholic grandees like Cardinals and Bishops still pontificate on women's swimwear, or the length of their skirts or the extent of their décolletage as they did, frequently, when I was a child back in the 1960s. But it is noticeable that they never denounced the incredibly short and tight short trousers that continental boys wore until adolescence and they had no problems with incredibly tiny shorts that were the universal sports wear for boys and teenagers at that time. Of course it is only in retrospect that we have learnt how many Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals liked boys not simply in skimpy shorts but no shorts, indeed, no clothes at all.
What Vailland presents us with is a very clear eyed portrait of a small town and society that is a microcosm of the larger world. It is a world that utterly contradicts every cliched norm about Italy as Catholic, family orientated with a reverence for women and children. There is nothing but superstition, greed, petty enmity and hate as well as misogyny that is almost painful to read. It was also a society of people obsessed with status and money which meant more than any family and certainly any friend. There were complex webs of obligation, patronage and dependence but all rested on gradations of power. It was a world built on the horrible unchanging, unrelieved omnipresent poverty of most people. The irony is that it is not family, church or politics that bring change but simple unrestricted or controlled prosperity that is not given, or brought or controlled, only a tidal wave of consumerism.
Interestingly there is no mention of the Church - at the time this novel was written the Catholic Church was in the last days of its post war Byzantine glory as Pius XII moved about his pontifical realm in a cloud of waving peacock fans, incense and young boy choristers. Its obsession with women's clothing (ensuring it was copious and all concealing) was as absurd as it was irrelevant (see my footnote *2 below).
Like all novels that live beyond their time 'The Law' says much not only about Italy but about any other society that has facade that conceals much - and I say that as someone from Ireland, another country where love of family, children and supposed respect for women concealed exactly the opposite. The hypocrisies and unexamined prejudices at the root of this novel are not simply to be found in the way the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper and Dennis Nielsen in the UK were ignored, forgotten and belittled because labelled as prostitutes or rent boys.
A truly brilliant novel that examines human nature with an honesty that is both acute and astounding in its clear sighted acuity.
*1 Vailland was disillusioned with the pieties and hypocrisies of Communist politics after the Soviet suppression of dissent in first, East Germany, and then Hungary.
*2 I have no idea if the Pope or other Catholic grandees like Cardinals and Bishops still pontificate on women's swimwear, or the length of their skirts or the extent of their décolletage as they did, frequently, when I was a child back in the 1960s. But it is noticeable that they never denounced the incredibly short and tight short trousers that continental boys wore until adolescence and they had no problems with incredibly tiny shorts that were the universal sports wear for boys and teenagers at that time. Of course it is only in retrospect that we have learnt how many Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals liked boys not simply in skimpy shorts but no shorts, indeed, no clothes at all.
August 14, 2011
This book is a literary exploration of the culture of Southern Italy as it dragged itself into modernity after the Second World War. The book won the Prix Goncourt in 1957 and, if it fails to be a masterpiece , it is precisely because it seems to have been written to win a literary prize.
There are the obvious nods to the Italian literature of the South. The book is an exercise in local colour and yet one fears that the local colour derives from an assiduous reading about Southern Italy rather than from a life lived in it.
The extended central sequence in which the wife of the judge has a doomed fling with the son of the local mobster is so obviously a pastiche of the French nineteenth century novel that it casts doubt on the good faith of much of the apparent realism of the rest of the novel.
However, despite this flaw, the book is a fascinating commentary on power and sexuality in a culture caught between feudalism and capitalism, sneering, brutal and corrupt yet suppressed into codes by habit.
It is a culture that is recognisable as having the same set of norms that would have applied to the region under the Romans and Robert Knapp’s recent ‘Invisible Romans’ would make a good comparative companion piece.
The book is rich with references to the relationship of past to future, the manipulation of the ‘rules’ by both men and women and the winners and the losers in the game. The plotting is exquisite.
Sexuality plays a major role, above all the sexual tolerances and viciousnesses (completely incomprehensible to Northern Europeans) by which life becomes tolerable so long as honour is not compromised. The male use of power to win sex is endemic as is female cunning.
In short, it is a brilliant fictionalisation of a society but one that amounts to a sociological treatise. It is detached and intellectual – and so very post-war French.
One almost questions whether it does not have some Marxist origin, except that Vailland writes throughout with such detachment and even sympathy for every character trapped within the ‘Law’, creatures of the social, that the observation implies no political programme.
The rather peremptory ending suggests that the story could just have gone on and on but just with different permutations of the relationships between characters who, though well written as flesh and blood, are better seen as ‘types’ – or perhaps pawns on a chessboard with the Law as gamesman.
This 'Law', of course, is not to be confused with the formal process of Law which is presented as just a sub-set of a greater 'Law' - as intrinsically political, corrupt and based on injustices that also match Knapp's account of the situation amongst the ancient Romans.
The promoters of the book seem to have had difficulty in finding a way to sell it to the public since, while the Prix Goncourt win would have helped it as might the Booker in London today, a literary-sociological description of a poor quasi-feudal society needs more punch than that.
They tried to sell it as a mystery based around the theft of a wallet and they over-played the rather brief section in which the Law is symbolised in a cruel, macho game, but these represent just the mcguffin that isn’t and an allegorical plot device respectively.
Not quite a masterpiece but a highly intelligent book that reads well in its detached intellectual way.
There are the obvious nods to the Italian literature of the South. The book is an exercise in local colour and yet one fears that the local colour derives from an assiduous reading about Southern Italy rather than from a life lived in it.
The extended central sequence in which the wife of the judge has a doomed fling with the son of the local mobster is so obviously a pastiche of the French nineteenth century novel that it casts doubt on the good faith of much of the apparent realism of the rest of the novel.
However, despite this flaw, the book is a fascinating commentary on power and sexuality in a culture caught between feudalism and capitalism, sneering, brutal and corrupt yet suppressed into codes by habit.
It is a culture that is recognisable as having the same set of norms that would have applied to the region under the Romans and Robert Knapp’s recent ‘Invisible Romans’ would make a good comparative companion piece.
The book is rich with references to the relationship of past to future, the manipulation of the ‘rules’ by both men and women and the winners and the losers in the game. The plotting is exquisite.
Sexuality plays a major role, above all the sexual tolerances and viciousnesses (completely incomprehensible to Northern Europeans) by which life becomes tolerable so long as honour is not compromised. The male use of power to win sex is endemic as is female cunning.
In short, it is a brilliant fictionalisation of a society but one that amounts to a sociological treatise. It is detached and intellectual – and so very post-war French.
One almost questions whether it does not have some Marxist origin, except that Vailland writes throughout with such detachment and even sympathy for every character trapped within the ‘Law’, creatures of the social, that the observation implies no political programme.
The rather peremptory ending suggests that the story could just have gone on and on but just with different permutations of the relationships between characters who, though well written as flesh and blood, are better seen as ‘types’ – or perhaps pawns on a chessboard with the Law as gamesman.
This 'Law', of course, is not to be confused with the formal process of Law which is presented as just a sub-set of a greater 'Law' - as intrinsically political, corrupt and based on injustices that also match Knapp's account of the situation amongst the ancient Romans.
The promoters of the book seem to have had difficulty in finding a way to sell it to the public since, while the Prix Goncourt win would have helped it as might the Booker in London today, a literary-sociological description of a poor quasi-feudal society needs more punch than that.
They tried to sell it as a mystery based around the theft of a wallet and they over-played the rather brief section in which the Law is symbolised in a cruel, macho game, but these represent just the mcguffin that isn’t and an allegorical plot device respectively.
Not quite a masterpiece but a highly intelligent book that reads well in its detached intellectual way.
March 5, 2017
Une histoire italienne écrite par un francais est toujours louche. Celle-ci n'echappe pas a la règle. Une histoire de femmes, d'amour, de vol et de viol. Très sincèrement, je n'en pense pas grand chose.
June 22, 2015
Uma boa novela, para passar o tempo, que retrata uma pequena comunidade do sul de Itália nos anos 50's, onde a influência de poderes - tanto por dinheiro como por informações - era tão usual quanto os donos de grandes propriedades roubarem, a bons termos, a virgindade de todas as suas empregadas e mulheres dos empregados.
(aqui fica-)
(aqui fica-)
July 8, 2018
I read the English language version of this book, it was excellent. A fascinating study of a small Italian community during the 1950s in which the Law is observed as a game played in the taverns of southern Italy and also the social hierarchy by which the town is organised.
March 28, 2025
It was an interesting read, full of detail that really transports you to someplace called Apulia. I say "someplace called Apulia," because, having never been to the real Apulia, I have no idea whether the place to which I was transported is a true mirror of the place.
Fictional drama is, like all other arts, a matter of building tension and releasing it; there were many interrelated stories that built tension around the matter of escape; you expected that at least one of the characters or relationships might achieve escape from the settlement that lives under The Law. The denouement would seem to echo what I gathered from the author's biography: he had dreams of escape for all humanity, but was ultimately disappointed.
Fictional drama is, like all other arts, a matter of building tension and releasing it; there were many interrelated stories that built tension around the matter of escape; you expected that at least one of the characters or relationships might achieve escape from the settlement that lives under The Law. The denouement would seem to echo what I gathered from the author's biography: he had dreams of escape for all humanity, but was ultimately disappointed.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 26, 2024
It keeps the pace of similar stories of its time, and while it shows several characters and their respective aspects, for the reader to identify or catch a message within them, maybe feeling a resemblance - or not, seems to me it still could not escape of a cliche view. Naturally, reading it 60 years after its original publication keeps you with a different perspective.
November 12, 2023
In the Italian port of Manacore it doesn't matter who you are, you are either giving out the law (enforcing your will on others) or taking it (others are enforcing their will on you). Nothing else matters but your position in this power dynamic.
Meanwhile, everyone is overtly lustful for some from of escape or another. No one seems to be focused on acquiring wealth. Instead, the men in the village are obsessed with having sex with virgins and the women are obsessed with escaping the village, their marriage, themselves. Everyone is jealous. Mostly the older ladies are jealous of the young and beautiful virgins and the men are jealous of other men who get to sleep with virgins.
At times it’s not a very pleasant book but it’s too fascinating to put down. Don Cesare lives like a feudal lord, (and has sexual relations with all each member of his servants family as they become old enough), the gangster of the village is friends with the Police Commissioner. I don’t know if Vailland is harking back to a post war culture he knew or if he made the whole thing up. It seems both believable and not at the same time.
Meanwhile, everyone is overtly lustful for some from of escape or another. No one seems to be focused on acquiring wealth. Instead, the men in the village are obsessed with having sex with virgins and the women are obsessed with escaping the village, their marriage, themselves. Everyone is jealous. Mostly the older ladies are jealous of the young and beautiful virgins and the men are jealous of other men who get to sleep with virgins.
At times it’s not a very pleasant book but it’s too fascinating to put down. Don Cesare lives like a feudal lord, (and has sexual relations with all each member of his servants family as they become old enough), the gangster of the village is friends with the Police Commissioner. I don’t know if Vailland is harking back to a post war culture he knew or if he made the whole thing up. It seems both believable and not at the same time.
May 8, 2013
قرأت النسخة المترجمة للاستاذ عبود كاسوحة (منشورات وزارة الثقافة السورية)، وهي ترجمة جيدة جدا لقصة جميلة ورقيقة تحكي الحياة في جنوب إيطاليا. ليس للكتاب أي هدف معقد أو بداية ونهاية ذات معنى، هو فقط صورة للحياة.
كتاب جميل وترجمة رائعة...
كتاب جميل وترجمة رائعة...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews