Another November

by Roger Grenier, Alice Kaplan (Translator)

French writer Roger Grenier’s stunning novel tells of a group of friends in the southwest of France whose lives are forever changed by the German Occupation. The moral failings of one of them, Charles Merlin, which at first seem trivial and personal, assume more sinister dimensions when he collaborates with the Nazis. The narrator of the novel, a member of the resistance, watches Charles’s decline and gains a poignant education in his own failings as he tries to rescue the women in Charles’s life.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

86 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1986

About the author

Roger Grenier was a French writer, journalist and radio animator. He was Regent of the Collège de ’Pataphysique.

In his youth he lived in Pau, where his mother opened a shop selling glasses. During the war, Roger Grenier attended Gaston Bachelard's classes at the Sorbonne before actively participating in 1944 in the liberation of Paris. He joined Albert Camus in the newspaper "Combat" then in "France Soir". Journalist, he followed post-war trials which inspired his first essay in 1949 "Le Rôle d'accusé". Radio animator, writer for television and cinema, member of the Gallimard board, he is recipient of the "Grand prix de l'Académie française" awarded to him in 1985 for his whole work, more than thirty works at that moment, novels, including two best-sellers "Le Palais d'hiver" of 1965 and "Ciné-roman", Prix Femina in 1972, essays and memoirs. He is best known in the United States for his work "The Difficulty of Being a Dog" (Les larmes d'Ulysse), translated by Alice Kaplan. He is still writing and is a busy conference attendee, speaking about his works, literature, Gallimard, or his friends: Albert Camus and Brassaï.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of those French writers who convey the eating of a grape, and the sentencing of someone to 10 years in prison for collaborating with the Nazis, in the same sleepy tone.

We follow our unnamed narrator from childhood to old age over a scant 86 pages. He is a petty bourgeois French boy in the southwestern town of Pau, near the Pyrenees. His parents own a slowly failing commercial laundry. He is friends with a fat boy, Charles Merlin, who lives in one of the town's graceful villas and lives life carelessly. The narrator and Charles vie for the same girls, but the fatty always has the upper hand. When the narrator goes off to fight in World War II, Charles is exempted from service for being obese. Eventually both get married (Charles to a girl the narrator still loves). Charles loses some weight, "but he remained morally fat, if I can put it that way." Sure you can! We all know moral fatties, hidden behind their thin disguises. The narrator joins the French resistance; Charles's parents, in order to keep their nice villa, make friends with the local Nazis. Time passes. People begin to look old, and sometimes they die.

[Seingalt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Grenier is a somewhat overlooked French writer whose simplicity, irony, and understatement are probably out of sync with the times, which demand superficial complexity, showiness, and vulgarity of all things, of books most of all. Le Pierrot noir, a brief and wistful tale of an adolescence in occupied Pau, is, along with his excellent short stories, Grenier at his best. If you're interested only in fashionable books and the writers people are talking about, steer clear.