Les Racines du ciel

“If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness.” So Romain Gary would write ten years later, in the celebrated “Dear Elephant, Sir” published in Life Magazine on 22 December 1967, again developing the theme of the elephant as bearer of human freedom. Les Racines du ciel had already laid out the full argument, making this landmark novel the first to take the protection of nature as its openly declared central subject.

It is also, once again, a novel of resistance: resistance to everything that oppresses man, wherever and however it occurs. This is why Gary wrote, in December 1956, after Russian tanks entered Budapest: “The Hungarian elephants must be saved. One day they will resume their triumphal march” (Larat, op. cit., 48).

A very fine copy in a rare decorated contemporary binding by Georges Leroux.

From the library of René Rouzaud (bookplate).