Word: aym
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...BARKEEP OF BLÉMONT (280 pp.)-Marcel Aymé-Harper...
...French fiction has been obsessed with the theme of the Resistance movement. Usually it portrays the movement with the moralistic, black & white simplicity of Zane Grey on the subject of cowboys and rustlers. In dealing with the theme in The Barkeep of Blémont, French Novelist Marcel Aymé has granted it some of the complexity it possesses. Because he has gone beyond mere slogans and asked himself how people actually felt and behaved immediately following France's Liberation, his novel shines with quiet credibility...
...Barkeep of Blémont hardly manages to encompass the round story of the Resistance and Liberation; there was more altruism, idealism and common sense to it than Author Aymé admits. But he does strike a stout blow for the easygoing natural man in his perennial struggle with those to whom "an idea or creed takes precedence over life itself." The rest of Author Aymé's assumption is that the easygoing fellow is doomed from the start...
...with Pity. Even among the innumerable literary pessimists of Paris, 48-year-old Marcel Aymé sets something of a record in his skepticism about the human, race. A dour man with big ears and a considerable resemblance to Buster Keaton, he has a reputation for his provoking silences in company. (When André Gide kindly congratulated him on one of his plays recently, Aymé stared at the old master without saying a word.) In his books, there are only two emotions Aymé has any use for, humor and pity...