Books List

Author

Romain Gary, was a French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator of Jewish origin. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt under two names.

In his books and interviews, he presented many different versions of his parents' origins, ancestry, occupation and his own childhood. His mother, Mina Owczyńska (1879—1941), was a Jewish actress from Svencionys and his father was a businessman named Arieh-Leib Kacew (1883—1942) from Trakai (Trok), also a Lithuanian Jew. Arieh-Leib abandoned the family in 1925 and remarried. Gary later claimed that his actual father was the celebrated actor and film star Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom his actress mother had worked and to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Mosjoukine appears in his memoir Promise at Dawn. Deported to central Russia in 1915, they stayed in Moscow until 1920. They later returned to Vilnius, then moved on to Warsaw. When Gary was fourteen, he and his mother emigrated to Nice, France. Converted to Catholicism by his mother, Gary studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris. He learned to pilot an aircraft in the French Air Force in Salon-de-Provence and in Avord Air Base, near Bourges.

Editor

Gary became one of France's most popular and prolific writers, writing more than 30 novels, essays, and memoirs, some of which he wrote under a pseudonym.

He is the only person to win the Prix Goncourt twice. This prize for French-language literature is awarded only once to an author.  The Académie Goncourt awarded the prize to the author of that book without knowing his identity. Gary's cousin's son Paul Pavlowitch posed as the author for a time. Gary also published as Shatan Bogat, Rene Deville and Fosco Sinibaldi, as well under his birth name Roman Kacew.

In addition to his success as a novelist, he wrote the screenplay for the motion picture The Longest Day and co-wrote and directed the film Kill! (1971), which starred his wife at the time, Jean Seberg. In 1979, he was a member of the jury at the 29th Berlin International Film Festival.

The book LADY_L Is translated to Persian by Mr. Mahdi Ghubraie

Discription

Lady L. is a 1958 novel by the French writer Romain Gary. Gary wrote the book in English and translated it to French himself in 1963. Peter Ustinov directed a 1965 film with the same title based on the novel.

A delightful novel by the author of The Roots of Heaven. The tale is told by a Grande Dame who was born in France and now lives a much-honored 80-year-old widow in England. Lady Diana L. hears that the summer pavilion on her estate is to be torn down in an act of eminent domain to build a highway. For the entire novel, she is slowly walking to the pavilion with her old friend Sir Percy and telling of her origin.

Lady Diana was actually born Annette Boudin in a Paris slum, the daughter of an anarchist. She runs away when he tries to convince her to commit incest with him. Since she is familiar with the anarchist cause, she takes up with a handsome young anarchist name Armand Denis and becomes active in his acts of political terrorism.

To make her more effective in cozying up to the rich to assist in relieving them of their wealth, she is taught to look and act like a debutante. In the process, she meets the old Duke of Glendale, a wealthy collector who falls in love with her.

Sir Percy cannot believe what Lady L is telling him, having been taken in by the "back story" which Lord Glendale helped to connive to make the rich think she is one of them.

Romain Gary's Lady L is a page-turner which I read in two sittings on one day. It was made into a film directed by Peter Ustinov in 1965.