Romain SlocombeReseñas

This book is about a French soldier that is writing a letter to a local SS officer.
The letter is split up into chapters to make it easier to read.
I don't particularly like the person Paul-Jean Husson who is writing to the SS officer, he is a fascist, and a pervert, his son Olivier is married to a German-Jewish woman named Ilse but he doesn't find out till later that she is Jewish.
He hates the Jewish people, and believes that they are turning France in 1940-1945 into a "cesspool" due to foreign people in his country his "motherland" and something must be done about the "Jewish problem" or the Jewish question" as it was referred to in the book.
I do not share this opinion and I haven't read much about this era in time yet, but I don't understand why they condemned the Jewish people just due to their race and nationality or because they didn't like the way they worshiped god, because they are Judeo-christians.
Paul-Jean is lusting after & in love with his son's wife, who is only 19 and he is old enough to be her father which is disgusting, but eventually he manipulates the situation so they are intimate and she becomes pregnant with his child and was considering getting rid of it because it is suspicious why she is pregnant again after, having two of Olivier's children Hermione and Aristide so she thought it was a "silly or stupid mistake" and wouldn't speak to him afterwards because she was ashamed and didn't want Olivier to find out.
Since she was a German she married Olivier and he insisted on her becoming a French citizen so no one would suspect anything and Paul-Jean asked people that he knew to hide her documents so they wouldn't look any further into her background and find out that her religion was Jewish. However even though the "naturalization process" whatever that is I don't really understand what it is and what the Germans did to "naturalize the Jews" She was still questioned by the authorities and sent to a concentration camp where she died.
I think due to her thinking that it was a mistake that Paul-Jean Husson told the authorities that she was a Jew and that's why she was sent to Auschwitz and died, because that is exactly what happened to her, while still pregnant she was murdered by the Nazis!
He said "he still loved her and he also said that he hated the Jews" Ilse was Jewish so she was already doomed to die sadly.

Un polar très documenté sur les intrigues de la jeune Russie soviétique.

A la rigueur, on le trouverait sympathique. Portrait à la serpe d'un inspecteur de police.

4 étoiles (vertes) malgré le sujet ou plûtot pour le traitement du sujet. Impossible de trouver un inspecteur plus antipathique que Léon Sadorski, collabo, antisémite, pervers, sadique et misogyne qui profite de la Collaboration pour monter quelques juteux trafics personnels et régler quelques comptes tout aussi personnels. L’homme commet les pires exactions. Il révulse. Il révolte. Inspiré à ­Romain Slocombe par Louis Sadosky, chef du « rayon juif » à la direction des renseignements généraux, odieux fonctionnaire haissant les « youtres », qu’il a tendance à confondre avec les « bolcheviques » et tous ceux qui, à ses yeux, appartiennent à « l’anti-France ». L’affaire Léon Sadorski est un roman noir et âcre, autour d’un salopard tout sourire, qui, sans scrupule, abuse de son petit pouvoir pour passer entre les mailles du filet. Le talent de Slocombe réside dans sa façon de mêler littérature populaire et description vertigineuse d’un abîme d'apparance si ordinaire.

C’est peu dire que c’est une nouvelle ouverte. Non, le lecteur ne saura pas le fin mot de l’histoire et restera avec toutes les questions qu’il se sera posées au fil de sa lecture. Pas une réponse ne lui sera donnée.
Et je ne prétendrais pas faire mieux que l’auteur, Romain Slocombe car, s’il laisse ses lecteurs dans l’expectative, il a construit sa nouvelle d’une main de maître, et moi qui en général n’aime pas rester ainsi sur ma faim, j’ai été captivée par cette courte lecture que je n’ai pas pu lâcher, et j’en ai aimé le dénouement qui n’en ai pas un, j’ai aimé être baladée d’hypothèse en hypothèse, de toujours voir tout s’effondrer comme un château de cartes.
Je n’en dirai pas plus, car le plaisir est dans la découverte, mais je pense que cette nouvelle pourra plaire autant aux habitués du genre qu’à ceux qui le regardent parfois d’un peu loin. Une lecture-détente, mais pas forcément reposante !

Le dernier petit polar SNCF que j’ai dans mes archives, et ce n’est pas une réussite. Une femme qui revient sur les lieux de son enfance (pas gaie, c’est un euphémisme) une dizaine d’années plus tard. Bar-le-Duc dans la Meuse, la Première Guerre Mondiale toujours présente, une ambiance lourde et sinistrée. La France profonde comme il est dit une ou deux fois.
Mais cette histoire m’a parue incohérente. C’est aussi un euphémisme que de dire que le trait est forcé. Enfance malheureuse, et puis moins de deux heures après avoir débarqué dans la ville, tomber nez à nez avec son (ou un de ses…) bourreau, et puis tout qui tourne mal alors qu’il ne la reconnait même pas.
L’auteur force le trait, ne fait pas les choses à moitié, n’y va pas avec le dos de la cuillère … On peut employer l’expression que l’on veut, le résultat est le même et est aussi indigeste que la quiche lorraine à la moutarde du resto routier où s’arrêtent les personnages principaux.

The best novel I have read this year, and at times, not easy reading. Paul-Jean Husson is a writer, a member of the Academie Francaise, and a believer in the values of "Old France", a France that has long since disappeared. He is also an anti Semite - but an anti semite based not on race hatred per se, but as he sees it, based on on what he sees as sound intellectual analysis even if he can't help referring to Jews - other than those he personally knows of course - as kikes, hooknoses, and Israelites. His world starts to come apart as he feels increasingly attracted to, and then obsessive about, his daughter in law Ilse, a former German actress. As the attraction becomes deeper he is torn between his need to protect her (in order to exploit her later) and his anti semitic views and the commitment to the Vichy regime.

In the end of course the reality of his intellectual choices are brought into the open in a horrible scene involving the French Gestapo, possible resistance operatives, and a deserted cottage. But the horror of this scene does not change his views, and lead to an astounding betrayal

This is a wonderful book. In modern literature, the French narrative of the war has focused on the Resistance. Slocombe has no time for this - of course there were many brave Resistance fighters but there were an awful lot of others who were either "11th hour resisters" or truly believed that collaboration with Germany represented the best hope for a revived France. It is this group that Slocombe mercilessly pursues. His book is not subtle but it feels honest and true.

If you read nothing else this year, read this. Remarkable

Engagingly and credibly written, Monsieur Le Commandant nevertheless makes for uncomfortable reading at times. Squirming at Husson’s stomach-churning racist and antisemitic slurs I left this novel not, as some might think, with a bad taste in my mouth, but with the very real feeling that I had confronted a deeply unsavoury aspect of France’s 17675247past and come out all the better for it. Despite the essential contradiction of Husson’s feelings for his daughter-in-law that even his deep-rooted antisemitism inexplicably cannot obliterate, this is a brave book, all the braver considering idiots out there that could potentially mistake Husson’s strong views for the author’s own. Flabbergasted that the larger events chronicled happened within living memory, this novel reminds us, not so gently, that many people in this life are, essentially, not very nice and that entire nations very close to home have history to be ashamed of which must be approached head-on. Atrocities were committed by men both large and small during the second World War and it is literature such as this, designed for shock and awe, that will ensure that we never, ever forget it

http://relishreads.com/2013/12/01/monsieur-le-commandant/