The Patagonian Hare
A Memoir
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The unforgettable memoir of 70 years of contemporary and personal history from the great French filmmaker, journalist and intellectual Claude Lanzmann
Born to a Jewish family in Paris, 1925, Lanzmann's first encounter with radicalism was as part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He and his father were soldiers of the underground until the end of the war, smuggling arms and making raids on the German army. After the liberation of France, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, making money as a student in surprising ways (by dressing as a priest and collecting donations, and stealing philosophy books from bookshops). It was in Paris however, that he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It was a life-changing meeting. The young man began an affair with the older de Beauvoir that would last for seven years. He became the editor of Sartre's political-literary journal, Les Temps Modernes—a position which he holds to this day—and came to know the most important literary and philosophical figures of postwar France. And all this before he was 30 years old. Written in precise, rich prose of rare beauty, organized—like human recollection itself—in interconnected fragments that eschew conventional chronology, and describing in detail the making of his seminal film Shoah, The Patagonian Hare becomes a work of art, more significant, more ambitious than mere memoir. In it, Lanzmann has created a love song to life balanced by the eye of a true auteur.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This remarkable debut of Lanzmann, world-renowned French journalist and film director most celebrated for his epic nine-and-a-half hour Holocaust documentary Shoah, illuminates the depth and breadth of a man's life in the context of enormous historical change and upheaval. His guiding voice weaves through events both comedic and grave, for just as his film is an oral history of the Holocaust, his memoir is an oral recollection of his life, told in great spurts of vocal energy (the text was dictated to assistants), fluid in time and chronology, and vividly detailed. Lanzmann discusses his work as a French resistance fighter during WWII, stealing philosophy books as a student in Paris, his relationship with Sartre and his affair with Simone de Beauvoir, and his sister's suicide. Lanzmann candidly reveals all, "simply to tell the truth." For "Where, if not in this book," he asks, "will it be told?" The incredible determination required to make Shoah speaks to Lanzmann's extraordinary artistic and humane vision: "I only obeyed my own rules, not yielding to the constraints of time or money, or those people who pressed me to finish. But that was how I was." This captivating and inspiring memoir attests to the fact that Lanzmann unyieldingly remains an individual dedicated to telling stories that matter, including his own.
