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  • Published: 19 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781939810564
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $35.00

Occupation Journal





A captivating literary and historical record, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal offers a glimpse into life in collaborationist France during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes and thoughts of one of France's greatest and most independent writers.

A captivating literary and historical record, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal offers a glimpse into life in collaborationist France during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes and thoughts of one of France's greatest and most independent writers.

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 one of the country's darkest hours. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s--a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation--Giono spent the war in the village of Contadour in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his consumptive daughter. 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 Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature's most voracious and critical minds.

  • Published: 19 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781939810564
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $35.00

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Praise for Occupation Journal

  • "For Giono, literature and reality overlap the way that waves sweep over the shore, one ceaselessly refreshing the other and, in certain wondrous moments, giving it a glassy clearness."--Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic
  • "Giono's voice is the voice of the realist; his accents are the accents of simplicity, power and a passionate feeling for a land and a people that he must love as well as understand."--The New York Times


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