La Loi

Roger Vailland here turns his sharp eye on the mechanisms of domination in a small southern Italian town: through its depiction of rivalries, clan struggles and strategies of alliance or seduction, the novel becomes a parable on the workings of power and social hierarchy.

The Prix Goncourt was awarded to it on the second ballot, by six votes to four over Michel Butor’s La Modification: a victory of the realist, political novel over the avant-garde Nouveau Roman. The prize crowned a graduate in philosophy, a fellow traveler of Surrealism and co-founder of the review Le Grand Jeu, who had also worked as a journalist. During the Occupation, he took part in the Resistance, notably in sabotage and derailment operations. It was at this time, cut off from his network, that he began writing Drôle de jeu, which won him the Prix Interallié in 1945.

An engaged intellectual, Vailland lived through the contradictions of his age. Initially a fervent Communist, he was shaken in 1956 by the revelation of Stalin’s crimes in the Khrushchev Report. His inner world collapsed. “I wept the day Stalin died. And I wept again on the road to Moscow […] when I had to kill him a second time, after reading the account of his crimes,” he noted in his journal on 5 June 1956.

Vailland remained a complex figure, closely watched by the Renseignements généraux: “An alcoholic and a drug user, he is, in private, far from favorably regarded,” they wrote in a note dated 29 July 1952. The man himself might well have been flattered by this portrait. While the police meticulously catalogued his Communist associations, his work established him as one of the most lucid observers of the political and social passions of his time, of which La Loi remains one of the high points.

A magnificent and striking copy with exceptionally wide margins.