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| Epigraph |
The boat left the Quai de la Joliette in Marseilles harbour about midnight. It was new moon and the stars were bright and their light hard. The coast with its long garlands of gas lamps faded slowly away. The lighthouses emerging from the black water, with their green and red eyes, were the last outposts of France, sleeping under the stars in her enormous, dishonored nakedness, humiliated, wretched and beloved.
-- Arthur Koestler, 1940  | |
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| Dedication |
Avec remerciements a Ann Godoff, pour son support et ses encouragements | |
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Long before dawn, Wehrmacht commando units came out of the forest on the Belgian border, overran the frontier posts, and killed the customs officers. | |
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On the radio, the BBC. A quintet, swing guitar, violin -- maybe Stephane Grapelli -- a female vocalist, voice rough with static. The volume had to be very low: radios were supposed to be turned over to the Germans, and Casson was afraid of Madame Fitou -- but he loved the thing, couldn't bear to part with it. It glowed in the dark and played music -- he sometimes thought of it as the last small engine of civilization, a magic device, and he was its keeper, the hermit who hid the sacred ring. [pp 102-103] "I'm a Hungarian, Casson. Not exactly by birth, you understand, but by nationality at birth. Still, Mitteleuropa, central Europe, is the world I understand, just like Adolf -- so I see clearly certain things. Some people say that Adolf is a devil, but he's not, he's the head of a central European political party, no more, no less. And what he means to do in France is to destroy you, to ruin your soul, to make you despise yourselves, that's the plan. He wants you to collaborate, he makes it easy for you. He wants you to denounce each other, he makes it easy for you. He wants you to feel that there's no nation, just you, and everybody has to look out for themselves. You think I'm wrong? Look at the Poles. He kills them, because they come from the same part of the world that he does, and they see through his tricks. You understand?" [Simic, p 97] The preparation of an escape, he thought, whatever else it did, showed you your life from an angle of profound reality. Where to go. How to get there. Friends and money must be counted up, but then, ~which~ friends -- who will really help? How much money? And, if you can't get that, how much? And then, most of all, when? Because ~these~ doors, once you went through them, closed behind you. [p 203] Yet, a mystery. [The screenplay for] ~Hotel Dorado~ was luminous. Not in the plot -- somewhere in deepest Fischfang-land there was no real belief in plots. Life wasn't this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn't work that way. Life was this, and then something, and something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere. In ~Hotel Dorado~ anyhow, the theory worked. A miracle. How on earth had Fischfang thought it up? The characters floated about, puzzled ghosts in the corridors of a dream hotel, a little good, a little bad, the usual tenants of life. They shared, all of them, a certain gentle despair. Even the teenager, Helene, had seen the world for what it was -- and love might help, might not. There were six tables in the dining room, the old waiter moved among them, you could hear the hum of conversation, the bump of the door to the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans as the proprietor cooked dinner. Thank heaven it wasn't Cocteau! The Game of Life as a provincial hotel -- Madame Avarice, Baron Glutton, and Death as the old porter. Fischfang's little hotel was a little hotel, life was a weekend. [p 148] | |
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| Last words |
HOTEL DU MER (1944) Brilliantly written and directed by Rene Guillot, the last weekend of a small seaside hotel in the south of France. Danielle Aubin (Citrine) is ravishing as a mysterious stranger. (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (1)
▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
This is the only one of Furst's noir thrillers so far in which the same character continues -- see Red Gold. | |
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▾Book descriptions
From Alan Furst, the author of such spy novels as Dark Star, Night Soldiers, and The Polish Officer, comes The World at Night. Set in Paris just following the fall of France to Germany in 1940, the book tracks film producer Jean Casson, a hard-core denizen of Paris nightlife. The Nazi occupation brings with it shortages, travel restrictions, and the petty humiliations of life under the German occupiers. But it offers Casson the chance for a comfortable life as a collaborator. Instead, he opts to take part in an ill-considered espionage plot, along the way rekindling an old and passionate romance with Citrine, a beautiful actress. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:16 -0400) (see all 4 descriptions) ▾Open Shelves Classification The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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A sub-plot involves Casson's efforts to make a movie during the Occupation, working with UFA and wondering how much must change now that the Nazis are involved, what constitutes collaboration and what is, simply, making a movie in strange times. The whole effort serves as a commentary, both on Casson as a character, and intentionally or not, also on the reader of genre fiction such as the spy novel. Good stuff.
Much is made of Furst's atmospherics, often with a whiff of disdain. Were there nothing else to the novel, I could agree with the criticism. For me, though, The World At Night is a little tale, told with panache and a very comfortable sense of time & place, and much of this is deliberate. But knotted at the heart of this story is a sober glimpse of the moral (and sometimes, ethical) weight pulling at a life in conflict. Like Hitchcock, I think, the point is not to be melodramatic or focus on the events of History. Rather, it is to examine the tensions and dilemmas of an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and from it glean something worth taking to heart. The agent / counter-agent business, Casson's collaboration with saboteurs, are very much a MacGuffin.
The ending was unexpected, as other reviews have mentioned, but I do not make too much of it. The turnabout came quickly, was handled in a few paragraphs, and the story was done. Primarily it was the speed of it that shocked. But it did not change the central problems facing Casson throughout the novel, and for that reason, I think, it is quite fitting.
More intriguing is Furst's reference to Rene Guillot, a French author but in the final words of the novel, named as the director of Casson's movie project. Why him and not a fictional director? Why not a director working in France at the time? Why not the director of a film adaptation (Fort de la Solitude) of one of Guillot's novels? Why indeed.
NOTE: Furst mentioned in his Aug 09 Author Chat that this book marks his first use of what he termed the "existential novel", culminating in Kingdom Of Shadows. He implied the first three books took a different form, and that those following Kingdom Of Shadows similarly adopted a different overall literary approach. So while his novels are often mentioned as an informal series, Furst suggests there may be mini-serials within the set. (