A Double Life

Repressed histories, sexual and political, drive this brilliant and wrenching story of a man whose emotional response mechanism has been terminally misdirected. Shortly after Guy de Roumegouse--a bored French career diplomat, husband and father--retires, a colleague idly suggests that he write his memoirs. Guy's subsequent reflections chart his transformation from a shy and lonely boy into a walking cipher, a man devoid of true identity and passion. Experiencing puberty under Nazi occupation in rural France, Guy watches as his first love, a boy named Fritz, is deported by the Gestapo. His brief, pathetic protest (one of the few visceral responses in his life) results in his (pro-Vichy) parents ""selling"" him to the Resistance to deflect Nazi suspicion from their family. Guy is hidden in a farmhouse loft with another teenager, a hustler named F lix who services German officers at the behest of the Resistance. Though he is drawn to F lix, Guy cannot bring himself to act upon his feelings for fear of his would-be paramour's German contacts. Guy's reverie is not linear; he does not seem to take any pleasure in telling his tale nor, indeed, even care about the outcome. So this account of his formative wartime years is interspersed with the story of the tired dissolution of his first marriage and the cheerless beginning of his second; his visits to a Rome prostitute; his oddly cold flirtation with a Jewish Jesuit in Rome, whose dual nature intrigues him; and the pivotal experience of watching the public punishment of Vichy collaborators after the war, too little and too late. Author and screenwriter Raphael (Coast to Coast; Eyes Wide Shut) has created a novel to remember out of a dispassionate vacuum. The shallowness of Guy's affect, product in part of a wartime habit of deception and in part of something deeper, is alternately chilling and magnificently tragic. (May) FYI: A Double Life was originally published in the U.K. in 1993.