Customer Reviews

Last Day of a Condemned

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An affecting and effective novel by France's version of Charles Dickens. This story follows a man from his conviction for an undisclosed murder, thorough his last days in a Paris prison cell, to his final moments before the guillotine. We are never told about the murder the protagonist committed, except he refers to it in a way that hints it was a spontaneous and regretted act of sudden violence against a man who genuinely wronged him, perhaps in a business dealing that left the main character financially wrecked. The man tells us of his childhood and reveals tiny, often tender moments from his life. We like him and wish he was not to die. He is a good man, a sort of everyman, and the feeling I had and I think all who read this might have, is that executing him is an injustice and a tragedy. In reading this I felt every second the man went through during his incarceration and ruin.