Word: boys
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...father, a social-climbing Frenchman who detested his wife's politics, had left for France before the war. But when the Loyalists lost, mother and son threw themselves on his untender mercies. When they arrived in France, he met them in a crowd of other refugees. Ignoring the boy, the father took one look at his wife and snapped, "You turn up with all this riffraff Hate the World. Still, Tanguy was happy in the little house outside Vichy where they settled, and for a while he felt like "an ordinary boy again." But the parents quarreled...
What happened to Tanguy at the Nazi camp adds little to the all too familiar living-death literature. What gives it a special horror in this book is that it all happens to a little boy. Tanguy would surely have died but for a German friend named Gunther who mothered him, fired his flagging will to live, and, before his own death, left the boy a matchless maxim: "Leave hate to those who are too weak to love...
What Now? At 19 Tanguy still cherished the image of a kind of prodigal son's return. But when he finally found his father in Paris, the boy was coldly rebuffed. Tanguy's mother, who also turned up in Paris, had equally little use for him. She was still a left-winger, lost in the intellectual Minotaur's cave of the '30s. At novel's end, with a wistful touch of Chaplinesque pathos, the 25-year-old Del Castillo, currently living in Paris, asks, "What is to become of Tanguy now?" and offers the shadow...
...artlessness with which Author del Castillo achieves a child's angle of vision makes his boy-hero Tanguy one of the most endearing and poignant figures in recent fiction. Child of Our Time is both a grim and a grand commentary on the human condition. The first response to this book is elemental-to weep. The second response is to marvel that Michel del Castillo endured what he did, and that, having endured, he could still forgive so much that is eternally unforgivable...
...LONG NIGHT, by Julian Mayfield (156 pp.; Vanguard; $3.50), puts a ten-year-old Negro boy through a Harlem wringer during one long night and shows him at dawn emotionally dry behind the ears. The kid's name is Frederick Brown, but he prefers to be called by his gang name: Steely. He is a 2nd lieutenant in the Junior Comanche Raiders, reads Superman comics and numbers Jackie Robinson among his heroes...