The American: A Memoir

Features of The American: A Memoir

From Publishers WeeklyThis is a story I have been careful never to tell myself, says Giesbert, a political journalist and former editor of France's Le Figaro, for fear I wouldn't be able to stand it. It's the tale of two Americans: the father who suffered the D-Day landing and later made Normandy his home; and his son, the author, born in the U.S. and raised in France. Giesbert's American grandmother remembers her son returning from the war somber and angry after having survived so many friends he saw dying and had to leave behind. This led, regularly, to wife and child beating. Giesbert, however, remembers my hatred for him, which, up until his death, ruined everything in me, my lucidity and my humanity, and spoiled all the occasions we had to make up. While deeply moving in passages (e.g., the re-creation of his father's D-Day trauma), the memoir feels claustrophobic. Although Giesbert's exorcism concludes with his decision to love everyone, even my enemies, and to live every day, every encounter, every conversation, as though it were my last, the palpable taste of hatred lingers even as an odor of regret pervades this work-a sort of love story where the three little words are I hate you. (Dec.)Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Product DescriptionA poignant, taut, and harrowing childhood memoir-a best seller in Europe-of a French-mans dark relationship with his American father.The authors father, Frederick Giesbert, was twenty years old when he landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, on June 6, 1944. It was to be the defining moment of his life, wounded to the quick at having survived. Three years after the invasion, Frederick was living in his hometown of Chicago, married to a French girl hed met in Normandy. But when the seemingly happy couple returned to Normandy to make a home with their baby, Franz-Olivier, something in the father snapped, and he began habitually to batter both his wife and his child.Franz-Olivier Giesbert spent his childhood defying, ignoring, and even plotting to kill his father. But as an adult he began searching for forgiveness, to free myself from the grief of never having given my father the chance to talk to me. Now that search comes to a deeply moving end, in this fiercely honest and emotionally gripping memoir.ReviewSays as much about the events in Normandy in 1944 as do many of the far weightier texts that it can honorably sit beside. -The EconomistFew writers have the audacity to rip themselves open like this, or to paint themselves as they truly are. -Le PointGiesberts style is all muscles, tendons, and nerves. -Le FigaroHarsh, painful, astonishing, and beautiful . . . As unexpected as it is sorrowful . . . Rarely is a writer so frank. -Livres HebdoThis dark story, in the tradition of Maupassant, is a miracle: gaiety, imagination, the drive to understand, and also tenderness . . . It has perhaps never been better shown how war continues long after its end and is spread from father to son. -Le Nouvel ObservateurEverything is told in a sustained rhythm . . . The style is vigorous,precise, brutal. -LExpressThe narrative never leaves a moment for pathos . . . Franz-Olivier Giesbert spent many years envisioning his book as a weapon. He would tell of the many blows, the failed life, the pleasure of never forgiving, and of memory fashioned by hate. Today, that book exists. It has a structure and a heart. It is called The American, a living homage. Father and son are speaking again. -Magazine LitteraireAbout the AuthorFranz-Olivier Giesbert was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and spent the first three years of his life in America. He is a novelist, biographer, and television host, and has been Washington correspondent for Le Nouvel Observateur and editor-in-chief of Le Figaro. He lives in Paris.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Ive spent my life trying to g