The Time of Our Lives

THE fact that this prize-winning French autobiography was penned by a fourteen-year-old girl invites comparison with the teen-age English autobiographer Denton Welch, whose Maiden Voyage attracted considerable critical attention last year. (Even Beverley Nichols awaited the ripeness of twenty-five to write his memoirs.) No two books could be more different. Maiden Voyage was perversely precocious, decadent, exhibitionist, nightmarish, painfully introverted, and repellently sophisticated. The Time of Our Lives is enormously sane, unassuming, genuinely childish, and yet brilliantly perceptive in its well-mannered objectivity.

A faithful description of family life under the German occupation, — the family was not involved in the Resistance and was fortunate in having minimum contact with the Boche, — it is essentially a record of changes of residence (determined largely by food conditions), life oil a farm, lessons, children’s games, and food-purchasing expeditions throughout the French countryside. The only dramatic pages are the last twenty, describing the arrival of the first Americans and the family’s return to Paris.

All this could easily be dull, but is in fact far from dull. Martino Rouchaud is completely successful in communicating to the reader the exuberance, the vitality, and the gaycty of youth which transformed the harassments and privations of the occupation into exhilarating adventure. You share wholeheartedly in her fun as she wheedles eggs out of grouchy farmers, plays pranks on her stuffy relatives, and demurely trips up swaggering Nazis in a crowded railway station.

But Miss Rouchaud has, too, an enchanting sense of humor, acute powers of observation, and the proper measure of seriousness for a jeune fills bien peasants brought up by a firm-willed, intelligent mother who made her commute to the city for piano lessons and saw to it that, war or no war, she and her sisters worked away at their Latin, English, History, and Composition. The Figaro was not exaggerating when it observed somewhat pompously: “Future historians will exhume such unassuming works in order to recapture the humble realities of life during great social upheavals.” It is perhaps a comment on the French upbringing, as contrasted with the Anglo-Saxon, that the more childishly written diary of the French jenne fills is more absorbing and more genuinely mature than the mundane confessions of Denton Welch, the English enfant terrible, The translation is a disgrace to a publisher as discerning as Pantheon. The spirit of the French original (which this reviewer has read) is wholly lost in a moronic transcription which sets out, with gruesome diligence, to render French slang into its exact American equivalent. The resulting deluge of “boy-oh-boys,” “zowies,” “yippces,” " swell guys,” “old girls,” and expressions such as “neat!" “drips,” and “going places” makes Miss Rouchaud sound like a cross between Mickey Rooney and a dead-end kid. This is the sort of “idiomatic” rendition which would conscientiously translate a salaam in an Arabic text into “Hiya Butch, how’s tricks?”

CHARLES ROLO