[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; at the same time, The Roots of Heaven evokes the hell of the Hitlerian domination of Europe and contains one of the deepest contemporary views of the sufferings of man in modern times…. Gary's ontology is based on the idealism of both romanticism and neoromanticism, and it is bolstered by a strong sense of the freedom of the w...

[Romain Gary's] themes, being huge, demand huge stories. In "Lady L," he indulged in melodramatic fluff lesser writers can do better. His "The Colors of the Day" suffered from its own overly glamorous background. But given a truly heroic setting, Gary proves himself one of the rare writers left who are capable of true heroes. This he demonstrated in "The Roots of Heaven" and in his undeservedly obscure "The Company of Men."… "The C...

In the autobiographical work, La Promesse de l'aube, Romain Gary tells us … about the factors that have determined his personal position and his humanitarian philosophy. First of all, this book is a moving tribute to his Jewish mother, a Russian woman, eccentric and mad in the eyes of her new French compatriots, who molds her son in her fashion and prepares him for an extraordinary career. And he has … fulfilled the promise tacitly made to that mother to accomplish everything she expect...

[The Company of Men deals with the] wake of wild boys—"orphans of the state"—in France, during that postwar interim when living conditions had arrived at a kind of classic hopelessness. There have been other French novels on the same theme, but The Company of Men, taking off from the hardboiled American novel, arrives at a kind of brilliant freedom and boldness, combining realism with a delicacy of fantasy and imagination that makes for an exhilarating effect. Certain techniques,...

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 there was one, a veritable Little Lord Fauntleroy of the gutter, and yet I must admit I managed to remain completely inured to his charms. In fact, with each new ingenuous pronouncement upon the human condition that the young philosophe made—"I believe that if you want to live, you should start very young because later on you&#...

[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. Briefly, the foreigners' predicament is that they have no money and nobody is interested in what they think. Gary reckons to make a fortune by insulting the Americans, and I dare say he will succeed. Many of the things he says about black racists, professional Negroes and white liberals are perfectly valid, even if a trifle obvious. It...

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 death and cause red faces among the members of the French literary establishment. It is an account of how, from the early 1970s onwards, he wrote four successful novels under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar, while continuing to publish other works under the name he had already long made famous…. His motive, he says, was a desire to renew...

[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 it all from inside the barbed wire and now narrates "The Dance of Genghis Cohn." As Cohn says, "If you are the holder of a historical world record for sadness, all that is left for you to hang onto is your sense of humor." But if the humor is not too black to swallow, most readers will find it blue enough, blasphem...

[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 inventions—atomic bombs, brain washing, concentration camps. This deep sense of protest is as evident as ever in his latest book, "Promise at Dawn," which opens with an imaginary evocation of the grinning gods of stupidity, dogmatic truth, mediocrity and servility. Its original title was to have been "La Lutte Pour l�...

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 not an imitator of Melville, but this latest, deep-searching work of his has many points of similarity to the American classic. Elephants, rather than whales, are the subject. But they are treated, a la Melville, on two levels—both as symbols and as straightforward noble mammals. M. Gary's hero, Morel, is, like Ahab, a man poss...

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, since the stories are quite uneven, the collection as a whole is remarkably provocative and enjoyable. Most of the stories provide us with some melodramatic villain to hiss at. M. Gary revives successfully the old-fashioned story—like those of O. Henry, Frank Stockton, or some of Robert Louis Stevenson—that has a definite anecdo...

["The Roots of Heaven"] should delight those readers who have lately assailed the French novel as over-introspective, pessimistic, and morbid. Romain Gary is a believer in life, action, freedom, an idealistic lover of exotic nature and of beasts. His heroes are the elephants of Equatorial Africa. Morel, a Frenchman who endured the horrors of German concentration camps, emerged from his nightmarish experience as a crusader for all that mechanically enslaves or crushes men, animals, and nature i...

[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 game he has turned to elephants and made them the pretext for an unusual work [The Roots of Heaven] that is part adventure story, part fable and part the record of a philosophical search for an answer to the increasing materialism of the world…. From the start M. Gary treats Morel as a legendary figure and as a result he remains rather indistinct as a p...

[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—the tragic despair of the bourgeois who constantly seeks distraction in order to escape the realities of his condition. In his pursuit of the impossible, he misses the few fleeting moments of happiness the present could offer. This social ill is represented by a group of characters who have devised various escape mechanisms….

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 English picaresque novels has spurred several Englishmen and a few Frenchmen to attempt a revival of the genre among us…. Romain Gary, soon after he made a startling entry into literature with one of the most moving books written about the underground in eastern Europe, Education européenne (1945) [A European Education], declared to...

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 complaint about Romain Gary's splendid book Promise at Dawn…. It is labeled nonfiction; the narrator is named Romain Gary; and he refers to his story, which coincides with the known facts of Gary's life, as "an autobiography." However, M. Gary has said: "This book is autobiographical in inspiration, but it ...

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 here for hidden meanings and obscure references that may provide clues to the author's state of mind and whatever motives may have compelled him to end his life. Les Cerfs-Volants is inscribed into the tradition of the Bildungsroman, which has produced notable examples in French letters. From the point of view of technique, there is noth...

[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 his family carry the love of France in their hearts; as true patriots, they know its history by heart. With his kite games the postman enjoys a reputation almost equal to the cuisine of Marcellin Duprat, master cook and patron of the Clos Joli restaurant: this is France, its little eccentricities and its love of good food! Page after page, ...

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 crimes—Nazi barbarism the best, but not the only, example. Gary pursues that obsession through the tale of the slide into schizophrenia of Jean Danthes, French ambassador to Rome, and produces a novel that is portentous and obsessive. Danthes is "a man of immense culture" to whom Europe's cultural warehouse is as familiar...

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 one of the funniest, saddest, most humane, most readable novels for years. The detachment of the child, his kerbside cynicism, the immediacy of the narrative style, the hilarious misuse of language ('dramatic' for 'traumatic', 'artistic' for 'autistic')—these are the features whi...