Occupation Journal (2020)

"Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during the country's darkest hour. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s and 1940s - a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation - Giono spent the war in the town of Manosque in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his family. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions. Giono recounts the details of his life with fierce independence of thought and novelistic attention to character and dialogue. Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature's most voracious and critical minds"--