Latest Review: "On Leave" by Daniel Anselme

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Paul Doyle on Daniel Anselme’s On Leave, translated by David Bellos, from Faber & Faber.

Here’s the beginning of Paul’s review:

In 1957, Daniel Anselme published On Leave, a novel about three soldiers on leave from the Algerian War. At that point during the war, only two of its eight years had passed and the full savagery and politically instability that would mark latter years of the conflict had yet to occur. Yet despite the national trauma of the intervening years, On Leave, as translator David Bellos notes in his introduction, is one of the rare literary responses to the war. It is even more remarkable given it received little notice when it was first published, and was then soon forgotten. It now makes its first appearance in English.

The story is simple: three soldiers, comrades and friends, go on leave to Paris for the Christmas holidays. They are friends only because they serve together. The sergeant, Lachaume, is an English teacher with middle-class ambitions. The corporal, Lasteyrie, is a single man more interested in women than anything else. And the infantryman Valette, is a kid Lachaume looks out for. As they try to get some sleep on the ride into Paris, Anselme wastes no time in showing how difficult it is going to be to interact with the civilian world. A World War I veteran finds the men and begins to lecture them on how great a nation France was, especially before World War II, blaming the loss of the colonies on the Americans and the Soviets. The speech is a paean to a past that never was, when French soldiers were at their best. The irony here is the French lost so many soldiers in World War I that, in the last year of the war, the soldiers went mutinying. It’s a comical speech, too, as the old man admits the French have their flaws.

For the rest of the review and some Friday morning reading, click here.