Promise at Dawn: A Memoir (Revived Modern Classic)

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book Ever
Review: "Promise at Dawn" is the first book of what can be considered as Romain Gary's Memoir ( this books ends with the end of WWII but Romain Gary's lived until December 2nd, 1980). Romain Gary was the only writer to be awarded twice the "Prix Goncourt" (the famous French litterary prize) , he was diplomat, movie maker, and a true lover of America. "Promise at Dawn" like most of his books is full of adventures, travels, unexpected meetings, love for life and a communicative optimism. This book made his mother a legend in the French litterature: she epitomizes the love of a mother for her son. "In Promise at Dawn", we live and breathe with Romain Gary during his early years: from his birth in Moscow in 1914 until his return to France after the Liberation.

Rating:
Summary: Best Book I've Ever Read
Review: Romain was a facinating character and a tremendous writer. As a lover of literature and a writer myself-I highly recommend this book. I read approximately 300-400 books a year and this is the best I have ever read, in my opinion. My favorite line: "it occured to me that life lies on sunny days." I cried, I laughed and I grew. What more can you ask from a book? Too bad, more are not written by like Promises At Dawn.

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly funny, maybe too outrageous
Review: This is called a memoir, but even those who have read other books by Romain Gary might be unprepared for how thoroughly he shows himself to be schooled in ridicule, almost from the moment of his birth. In Chapter 2, at the age of thirteen, he was already in training to be a great writer. The first chapter ended with a paragraph describing his desire to battle the gods, "the god of Stupidity," (p. 5), "the god of Absolute Truth and Total Righteousness," (p. 5), "the god of Mediocrity," (p. 6), "the god of Acceptance and Servility," (p. 6) and "other gods, less easy to unmask, shifty and shrouded in mystery;" (p. 6), for whom "my mother had been one of their favorite toys; they never left her in peace; from the snows of Russia to the shores of France, with her child in her arms, it was in vain that she tried to escape from them." (pp. 6-7). Romain Gary needed to defeat those gods and "tear down the veil of darkness and absurdity concealing the true face of the universe." (p. 7).

Published in 1961, this book has the kind of earth-shaking humor that formed the basis for THE DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN in 1967 (in French) and 1968 (English translation). For all the chapters in PROMISE AT DAWN which are devoted to basking in maternal love, there are chapters in which people fail to show the same attention to him that his mother did. Chapter 11, when he was nearly nine, starts with a description of Valentine, a lovely eight-year-old girl, whose first words to him seem to be, "Janek ate his whole stamp collection for me." (p. 70). Such people must be doing the TV scripts of contest shows, as this kind of behavior seems to inspire some contagious reaction approaching insanity. "I ate for the lady one of my rubber galoshes." (p. 70). Curiously, she asked, "Are you going to eat it raw?" (p. 72). On a literary level, "Twenty years later this puppy love inspired my first novel, A EUROPEAN EDUCATION, and also some passages in THE COMPANY OF MEN." (p. 72). There have been other things that Romain Gary has done in his life, but it is difficult to imagine that he could have done any of them better than writing books.