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Romain Gary.
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Born Romain Kacew in Moscow 8 May 1914, Romain Gary spent the first fourteen years of his life in Russia and Poland. His mother, Nina Kacew, an actress and the daughter of a Russian-Jewish watchmaker,...
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Under the cover of verbal humor often taken beyond the limits of good taste, the substantial work of the French novelist Romain Gary deals with moral issues of resistance to Nazism, racial discriminat...
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Critical Essay by Jean Garrigue
[The Company of Men deals with the] wake of wild boys—"orphans of the state"—in France, during that postwar interim when living conditions h...
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Critical Essay by Henri Peyre
The wish to recover in fiction something of the boisterous illogic and of the impetuous action which had once entertained our ancestors in the Spanish, French, and Englis...
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Critical Essay by Pamela Marsh
[In Romain Gary's novel], treating the concentration camps as one huge joke hardly grates at all, especially when the joke is told by Genghis Cohn, who has seen i...
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Critical Essay by Auberon Waugh
[White Dog] is so boring and so disgusting that I would not review it at all if it did not demonstrate one reaction to the foreigners' predicament most vividly. ...
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Critical Essay by Daphne Merkin
Momo is so strenuously, so determinedly heartwarming, that it seems in constant danger of blowing a fuse. As for the orphan boy Momo, he's a winsome tyke if ever...
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Critical Essay by John Naughton
So … what have we here? [Is Momo a] crateload of schmaltz about there being honour even among whores (and their children)? At one level, yes. At another, we have...
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Critical Essay by Patrick Breslin
Romain Gary, author of a score of books, is obsessed in this new novel [Europa] with the chasm between Europe's great cultural achievements and its great crime...
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Critical Essay by Earl W. Foell
It seems strange that the publicists escorting ["The Roots of Heaven"] to its American debut have not compared it to "Moby Dick." M. Gary is...
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Critical Essay by Ted R. Spivey
[Gary] has a visionary sweep that allows him to show how romantic idealism plays a role in modern life. Gary projects man into a new age that lies beyond modern tragedy...
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Critical Essay by Sergio Villani
[The title of Romain Gary's novel, Les clowns lyriques], a phrase from Gorky, is an image of the despair which, according to Gary, tortures Western societies&#x...
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Critical Essay by G. Mermier
[In Les cerfs-volants] Ambroise Fleury is a postman for the French PTT, an unusual postman who plays with kites, who gives them familiar or funny names…. [He] and h...
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Critical Essay by John Weightman
When the novelist, Romain Gary, committed suicide some months ago, he left behind [Vie et Mort d'Émile Ajar, a] small time-bomb to explode after his deat...
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Critical Essay by Daniel E. Rivas
In spite of some biographical overtones, Les Cerfs-Volants is a piece of fiction, not a political or sociological tract, although some critics will inevitably search ...
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Critical Essay by Henri Peyre
["The Roots of Heaven"] should delight those readers who have lately assailed the French novel as over-introspective, pessimistic, and morbid. Romain Gary i...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
[M. Romain Gary's] The Colours of the Day was set in the highly civilized, sophisticated jungle of the South of France. Now looking for bigger ga...
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Critical Essay by Frederic Morton
[Romain Gary's] themes, being huge, demand huge stories. In "Lady L," he indulged in melodramatic fluff lesser writers can do better. His "...
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Critical Essay by Charles Rolo
It is, I submit, unsettling if not wicked for the author of a personal history to leave one guessing as to where fact ends and semifiction begins. This is my one complai...
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Critical Essay by Curtis Cate
[Romain Gary's] books ring with the echo of a profoundly Russian, if not Manichean, bafflement before the spectacle of a world bristling with new satanic invention...
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Critical Essay by Charles C. Lehrmann
In the autobiographical work, La Promesse de l'aube, Romain Gary tells us … about the factors that have determined his personal position and his hum...
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Critical Essay by William Barrett
Hissing Taies … is a good illustration of [Romain Gary's] copious and lively imagination; and though his facility does not always serve him equally well...
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Romain Gary
Critical Essay by Jean Garrigue
