Just as it will sometimes happen that a critic feels obliged to preface a review with a declaration of interest, so I should now declare a lack of interest. Prior to being commissioned to review David Bellos’s heroically well-researched and hugely entertaining biography, I confess I had never managed to finish one of Romain Gary’s books.
When I lived in Paris in the 1970s Gary was in fact my near neighbour. A conspicuous figure around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, ‘disguised as himself’, as Bellos phrases it, flashily tanned, resembling in his flamboyant black-leather outfits a cross between a plumper Dali and the clownish caricature of a Mexican dictator, the thick dye of his improbable jet-black hair and moustache visible from the far side of the boulevard, a committed Gaullist to boot, which didn’t help in the post-1968 years, he had about his person an aura of glossy sleaze, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron.
And his novels? Yes, they were regular bestsellers, had been (mostly atrociously) filmed — The Roots of Heaven by John Huston, Lady L by Peter Ustinov — and twice won the Goncourt (the second time illegitimately, of which more later).
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