“..Ghostly Demarcations: On Ramon Fernandez..”
“..The latest arrival on the ever expanding shelf of volumes assessing literary reputations during the years of the Nazi occupation of France is a long book with a short title.
Ramon is a son’s biography of his father, a collaborator ..
.. and it’s hard to imagine a more tangled, unresolved contradiction of a literary career than his.
Translated by T.S. Eliot in The Criterion, apostrophized by Wallace Stevens in one of his best-known poems ..
.. Ramon Fernandez was an esteemed literary critic who became, from 1936 to 1943, the self-appointed “minister of culture” for a fascist populist movement led by Jacques Doriot, the former communist mayor of Saint Denis.
For Fernandez’s son, Dominique, now 80, the untangling of those contradictions has been a life’s work.
Ramon is part of a subgenre of literature by children of collaborators currently in full flower in both memoir and fiction..”
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