Théâtre / Roman

When the book appeared in 1974, it was wrapped in a red and white band reading “Mon dernier roman” (“My last novel”). One might indeed be tempted to view this twilight novel as a kind of testament and farewell. But Louis Aragon, seventy-seven years old at the time of publication, offers here an astonishing lesson in youthfulness: his life is a theater, and along the way he delivers, in parodic fashion, a lesson in writing to young writers convinced of their own modernity and of having “surpassed” him.