Повинная голова

by Romain Gary, Ромен Гари

В романе «Повинная голова» великий мистификатор Р. Гари рассказывает о происхождении другого мистификатора – великого афериста и насмешника, обложившего Таити «налогом на Гогена».

Genres: French Literature

351 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Romain Gary was a Jewish-French novelist, film director, World War II aviator and diplomat. He also wrote under the pen name Émile Ajar .

Born Roman Kacew (Yiddish: קצב, Russian: Кацев), Romain Gary grew up in Vilnius to a family of Lithuanian Jews. He changed his name to Romain Gary when he escaped occupied France to fight with Great Britain against Germany in WWII. His father, Arieh-Leib Kacew, abandoned his family in 1925 and remarried. From this time Gary was raised by his mother, Nina Owczinski. When he was fourteen, he and his mother moved to Nice, France. In his books and interviews, he presented many different versions of his father's origin, parents, occupation and childhood.

He later studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris. He learned to pilot an aircraft in the French Air Force in Salon-de-Provence and in Avord Air Base, near Bourges. Following the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, he fled to England and under Charles de Gaulle served with the Free French Forces in Europe and North Africa. As a pilot, he took part in over 25 successful offensives logging over 65 hours of air time.

He was greatly decorated for his bravery in the war, receiving many medals and honors.

After the war, he worked in the French diplomatic service and in 1945 published his first novel. He would become one of France's most popular and prolific writers, authoring more than thirty novels, essays and memoirs, some of which he wrote under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar. He also wrote one novel under the pseudonym of Fosco Sinibaldi and another as Shatan Bogat.

In 1952, he became secretary of the French Delegation to the United Nations in New York, and later in London (in 1955).

In 1956, he became Consul General of France in Los Angeles.

He is the only person to win the Prix Goncourt twice. This prize for French language literature is awarded only once to an author. Gary, who had already received the prize in 1956 for Les racines du ciel , published La vie devant soi under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar in 1975. The Académie Goncourt awarded the prize to the author of this book without knowing his real identity. A period of literary intrigue followed. Gary's little cousin Paul Pavlowitch posed as the author for a time. Gary later revealed the truth in his posthumous book Vie et mort d'Émile Ajar .

Gary's first wife was the British writer, journalist, and Vogue editor Lesley Blanch (author of The Wilder Shores of Love ). They married in 1944 and divorced in 1961. From 1962 to 1970, Gary was married to the American actress Jean Seberg, with whom he had a son, Alexandre Diego Gary.

He also co-wrote the screenplay for the motion picture, The Longest Day and co-wrote and directed the 1971 film Kill! , starring his now ex-wife Seberg.

Suffering from depression after Seberg's 1979 suicide, Gary died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on December 2, 1980 in Paris, France though he left a note which said specifically that his death had no relation with Seberg's suicide.

Reviews

[Danielle Lafrance · Rating 3 out of 5]

Avec cette satire picaresque dont le « misérable et futé » picaro est l'anti-héros principal, nous plongeons dans le délire de la culpabilisation totale, quasi démentielle : toutes les erreurs et toutes les cruautés qui ont permis à l'être humain depuis la nuit des temps de prouver son inhumanité, cet homme ─ qui croit avoir réussi à se fuir en fuyant sa véritable identité et toutes les formes d'autorité et de pouvoir de la planète ─ les porte sur son dos... ce qui ne suffit pas à le faire disparaître, lui et son destin, dans la peau hautement surveillée d'un « ignoble » roi des parias de la Polynésie française.

[Horvallis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cynique, impertinent, politiquement incorrect, truffé de remarques inoubliables et hilarant de bout en bout. Jubilatoire.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 2 out of 5]

“madcap” in the most pejorative sense of the term. a book that could only come from the eight months bookending its creation. about inauthenticity and the decline of the creative impulse, as delivered through a spy caper set in tahiti, in which several dissolute artistes-on-the-run are dragooned into recreating the lives of gauguin and his hangers-on, thereby denying or erasing their own artistic expressions in the process. cohn’s art is ephemeral: sand sketches done at night, to be swept away by the morning tide, or composing a visual canvas of his own sexual escapades (body of woman in foreground set against tropical flora in background with ship passing through at crucial moment) but never actually painting the image; verdouillet suffers a crisis when he, after 20 years of making cheap gauguin-ish knockoffs for tourists, inadvertently discovers a genuine personal style, and thereby loses all public interest; and callum reigns as americas de jour literato, practicing a style known as “abstentionism,” in which a rejection of imperialism and conformity is registered by the refusal to actually write, and his fame grows as he releases nonnovel after nonplay after nonwork (“the most convincing spokesman of the ‘no’ generation, a total dissenter who had successfully resisted the urge to write an immense masterpiece”). and all of this only partially declared, as much of it develops in the interstices of a plot in which the cia, communists, and french sdece are all trying to assassinate, in bumbling pink panther style, cohn. it all mostly sucks.

[Marc-Antoine Serou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Romain Gary’s best book, but very good nonetheless.

[Maryna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Один мой друг очень метко отзывается о маршмеллоу - "ничто с вкусом ничего".
Вот такая же у меня ситуация и с "Повинной головой" - для меня эта книга была как дневник, где автор описывает события вяло, медленно, не ставя цель что-то этой книгой донести или доказать, просто рассказ ради процесса рассказа. В отзывах многие пишут о замечательных иронии и сарказме, которыми Ромен Гари пропитывает все произведение. Но эти ирония и сарказм, которые дейтсвительно прямо капали с книги - абсолютно все персонажи, события и пейзажи пропитаны ними! - это было для меня очень нелепо. Как какие-то низкокачественные сатиристические статейки в журнале. Я не называю такой книгу, совсем нет! Просто для меня эта книга стала, как говорят на одном книжном сайте, "не по моему читательскому профилю". Прошла мимо, не оставив по себе ничего.

З.Ы. Оба раза Гари ко мне пришел через мои книжные клубы, оба раза - негативно. Дело в клубах, мне или таки в Гари?))))