Tag: Occupied France

Review | Madeleine, Euan Cameron | MacLehose Press

 “I always stay at the Louisiane when I’m in Paris, if only for sentimental reasons. It is not the most comfortable of hotels, but I like to think of figures such as Henry Miller and Ezra Pound staying there in the years between the wars. There is still a lingering louche whiff of a hôtel de passe, and of what I imagine Paris to have been like in the immediate post-war period, with those cobbled streets, open-backed buses and the faces that you see in Brassaï’s photographs.”

Madeleine is a perfectly-formed, psychologically acute first novel of love and war, shameful secrets and cowardly treachery. Euan Cameron’s prose sparkles with unsettling beauty and intelligence as he vividly brings to life the world of the French haute bourgeoisie that is shot through with chauvinism, moralistic posturing and anti-Semitism.

Continue reading Review | Madeleine, Euan Cameron | MacLehose Press

Interview | Euan Cameron | Author of the Week

Euan Cameron has enjoyed a long career first as a publisher and subsequently as a translator and book reviewer. He has translated over thirty books from French including works by Simone de Beauvoir, Julien Green, Paul Morand, Pierre Péju, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, Philippe Claudel and Patrick Modiano, as well as biographies of Marcel Proust and Irène Némirovsky. He was appointed Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011. His first novel, Madeleine, was published in June by MacLehose Press.

Where were you born, and where did you grow up? 
Born in London, but I grew up in Dorset and in Buenos Aires.

Were the members of your family big readers?
My mother was a serious reader. She was always reading a recently published novel or a literary biography. When we lived in Argentina, she ordered books she had read about in her weekly New Statesman from the Librería Mackern in Buenos Aires.
 Continue reading Interview | Euan Cameron | Author of the Week

Interview | Gabriel Josipovici, author & critic

Gabriel Josipovici is a pre-eminent British novelist, short story writer, critic, literary theorist, playwright, and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. Georgia’s exclusive interview for BookBlast® celebrates the publication this week of his latest novel, The Cemetery in Barnes, (Carcanet).

You were born during World War Two in Occupied France, what are your memories of that time?
I was born in Nice but we escaped to La Bourboule and Le Mont Dore in the Massif Central during the war. They were spa resorts for people suffering from lung problems, and so were full of hotels – La Bourboule was for children and Le Mont Dore for adults.

My parents had arrived in France newly-married from Egypt. My father had done his studies in French and wanted to go to a French university so he got a place at the University of Aix-Marseille. They lived in Aix while he did his doctorate, and then bought a house in Vence. Somehow they failed to take on board all that was happening. War started and I was born in Nice in October 1940, on the last day they could have got out back to Egypt as they had tickets for a ship. Nice was not the zone libre, but it was under tutelage of the Italians who were good to their Jews.
 Continue reading Interview | Gabriel Josipovici, author & critic

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