Promise at Dawn [Paperback]

[Tzvetan] Todorov praises the way Garys novels, unclouded by ideological intention and unflinching in the face of suffering, radiate colors at once tragic and vibrant with joy and life. Nowhere is Todorovs praise truer than in Garys last novel, now appearing for the first time in English in the superb translation of Miranda Richmond Mouillot.An origin myth full of inventions and omissions, Gary framed his artistic emergence as an unusual love story about his long-suffering mothers mad devotion to him.To figure out who Gary was and how he arrived at his intricate marriage of absurdist comedy and humane instruction, you have to turn to that memoir, Promise at Dawn, a matchlessly entertaining and psychologically persuasive book.A celebrated and infinitely seductive portrait of his early life, which is still oftendescribed as an unprecedented innovation in the writing of autobiography inFrance. ? ? ? ? ? ??Perhaps the only memorial by a son that raises the rare literary pleasure oflaughter in the reader as a measure of appreciation.What talent, most certainly, how many ideas and passions too. You seize usand shake us. Ah!