Love in the Days of Rage [Paperback]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2001

"The more I make love, the more I want revolution; the more I make revolution, the more I want to make love." In Paris, in May of 1968, revolution, and love are very much in the air. The barricades are going up, the students of the Sorbonne are taking to streets alive with the graffiti of revolt, and the Odeon is ablaze with speechmaking.

For Annie, a young American painter, and Julian, her Portuguese lover, a banker and anarchist, the events of that Paris spring form the backdrop against which their love affair is played. Annie sees the world through an artist's eyes; she is reckless in her passions, wanting and needing love with other people. There is none of this fanciful nonsense for Julian, an anarchist disdainful of the entire human race, who thinks even the enragé students storming the streets of Paris with there posters proclaiming "open the windows of your heart" and "revolution is the ectsasy of history" to be hopelessly naïve and sheeplike. Ferlinghetti charts the progress of love unfolding against those heady and momentous days when the pampered children of the bourgeoisie tried to find common cause with workers who despised them, "when Julian and Annie were in the heat of their love and reason."

Love in the Days of Rage is a work of lyricism and commitment, painting and politics, passion and intellect-a work to set beside the great expatriate novels of earlier generations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and one of the last of the great beats, has produced a slim novel about "what the brain does to the heart," set in the midst of the student revolution of 1968 in Paris. The brain, here, belongs to a mysterious anarchist banker, Julian Mendes. Julian, who on the surface lives a comfortably bourgeois existence, was born in Portugal and came to political maturity under the dictatorship of Salazar. He belonged to an anarchist group in Portugal, but split from the group due to irreconcilable ideological differences Julian was an incorrigibly individualistic anarchist. He was inducted into the secrets of the banking world by a friend of his father's, who made him the heir of a small fortune when he died. In Paris in 1968 for reasons unexplained, he meets Annie, the heart (and eyes) of the book. An American painter somewhat like Joan Mitchell, Annie has gone from abstract expressionism to some compromise with figurative painting. She is teaching at the Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1968, and her students are caught up in the revolutionary currents. She is intrigued and a bit repulsed by Julian, who talks "left" like her father but dresses "right" like a conventional banker. Finally, Julian reveals the gratuitous act that he has been planning, and Annie agrees to become his accomplice. The story belongs to Annie's painterly eye, through which Paris achieves a very pictorial intensity. Annie herself never seems fully surrendered to the story her inner life, in the end, remains as opaque as Julian's act. What will remain with the reader is the lyric hopefulness of the tale, at this distance a slightly melancholic reminder of the events of that tempestuous year.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Ferlinghetti is best known as a poet ( A Coney Island of the Mind ) and as publisher of City Lights Books. His first novel, Her , a surreal quest for the ideal woman, achieved a small cult following in the Sixties. This short novel is more realistic, treating the love affair of Annie, a young American artist in Paris, and anarchist banker Julien Mendeswith the 1968 student revolt as backdrop. Primarily a novel of ideas, more French than American in concept, this book is full of political debate, symbolism, and literary allusions. The love story itself achieves meaning only in relation to larger social concepts such as capitalism, anarchism, and freedom. A lyrical, poetic work that will appeal to a small, though sophisticated, audience. Recommended. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 116 pages
• Publisher: Overlook TP (October 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585672025
• ISBN-13: 978-1585672028
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,411,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A Lyrical Novella by a 1960's Beat Poet, June 9, 2009

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Bonnie Brody "Book Lover and Knitter" (Port St. Lucie, FL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Love in the Days of Rage (Paperback)

This is a short novel with a lyric quality similar to a poem. As far as I know, this is Ferlinghetti's only novel since his works of poetry in the 1960's.

It is a story about two lovers who meet in Paris in the 1960's amidst the student revolution. She is a true revolutionary. He's a banker but swears to be an anarchist working for the revolution on his own.

The story line is thin. The love scenes are beautifully wrought - - an impressionist painting in words.

"His body stirred and floated away, borne away by foreign currents, by alien gulf streams it seemed impossible to swim against, his body broke the surface and disappeared into the very heart of light, while she sank back and back, through the deep swirling waters, into the deep pearl, the final mystery . . . When she awoke, he was gone. (p. 39)