La Vie devant soi (Life before us) by Romain Gary.

Here is the incipit of the novel:

"La première chose que je peux vous dire c'est qu'on habitait au sixième à pied et que pour Madame Rosa, avec tous ces kilos qu'elle portait sur elle et seulement deux jambes, c'était une vraie source de vie quotidienne, avec tous les soucis et les peines. Elle nous le rappelait chaque fois qu'elle ne se plaignait pas d'autre part, car elle était également juive. Sa santé n'était pas bonne non plus et je peux vous dire aussi dès le début que c'était une femme qui aurait mérité un ascenseur."

The first thing I can tell you is that we lived on the sixth floor and that, for Madame Rosa, with all the pounds she was carrying around and only two legs, it was a real source of daily life, with all its worries and sorrows. She would remind us of that each time she wasn't complaining otherwise, because she was also Jewish. Her health wasn't good either and I can also tell you right away that she was a woman who would have deserved an elevator.

As you may have already guessed, Romain Gary (and under his aka name of Emile Ajar) is one of my favorite writers. Romain Gary deeply moves me as few other writers do: chez Gary, you encounter a fragile blend of ever burning indignation against injustice, ignorance, racism, stupidity; a ferocious irony against himself and most of the humanity, an explosive combination of hope and despair that give us some of the most beautiful pages of French literature.  

Gary liked to tell the story of a chameleon: you put it on a red blanket, he turns red; on a green blanket, he turns green; on a blue blanket, he turns blue; on a plaid, he explodes. Romain Gary is a lot like the chameleon of his story. Born to a Jewish single mom in Vilnius, he already had experienced several lives before arriving to Nice in 1928 (he is then 14): his real one, the one of a Jewish little boy raised by a single mom in a very anti-Semitic environment (Russia then Poland); and the many ones his mother was dreaming aloud for him: that he would become famous, as a French ambassador, or a French painter, or, even better (and safer[1]) as a French writer… His adult life would be no different: a Resistance fighter during the war (as a pilot in the RAF), a French consul in several countries (and more notably, in America, in Los Angeles), a film director and of course, at the same time, a very popular French writer. And, to this day, the only one to have won twice the Prix Goncourt; under his “true” name, first (for Les Racines du Ciel, in 1957) and then, under his alias, Emile Ajar, in 1975, for La Vie devant Soi. Five years later, he would end his chameleonic life by committing suicide.

A few nights ago, I finished reading La Vie devant Soi; I hadn’t read it again since I was in high school. For a long time, I favored La Promesse de l’Aube  and some other purely Gary pieces but La Vie devant soi is undeniably worth rereading and keeping on your bedside table. 

It is the story of two unforgettable characters, one at the beginning of his life, Momo (Mohammed), a young Arab kid, a son of a bitch (literally), that is being raised by an old Jewish lady, Madame Rosa, a former prostitute  and Auschwitz survivor, that now takes care of the children of  the Belleville neighborhood’s whores. Momo is the only narrator and you have to wait until the last page to understand to whom he is telling his story, aside from the reader. He is a street smart kid, who does his best to help Madame Rosa end her life up with dignity. But the most remarkable thing about Momo is the style Gary uses to make him talk: a very elaborate kind of literary spoken French that conveys the best of Gary/Ajar’s irony and humor and the kind of improbable French that could be spoken by an uneducated but smart and sensible kid. Momo wants to be a writer, like Victor Hugo, whom he has heard of by his old friend monsieur Hamil, a retired rug seller who tries to teach him a bit of religion but very often confuses the Koran with Les Miserables! And, most of all, he is in need of affection, of love. In this, he is typical of Ajar's/Gary's characters who all are desperately in need of affection, tenderness; like the main character of the novel Gros-Calin, Michel Cousin, who rescued a python and keeps it in his Parisian flat as his pet, for he needs some "human contact"...

As for Madame Rosa, she is probably one of the most touching and beautiful characters of the French literature. If the novel is a kind of coming of age for Momo, it is also a novel about elderliness, decrepitude, loneliness, death. And Gary depicts it all in both an intimate and crude way: Gary doesn't spare his readers with the physical decrepitude (we see Momo and Madame Lola cleaning Madame Rosa, dressing her up, changing her sheets...), but at the same time, because we see it all through the eyes of Momo - for whom the elderly lady is certainly an adoptive mother-, Madame Rosa, in her already lost battle against death, always manages to keep her dignity and her actions, which, otherwise, could be seen as pathetic, show on the contrary a sort of grandeur d'ame, retain some of this resistance spirit that was so important to Gary: like in the scene in which she gets dressed in her whore's clothes that do not fit her anymore (she has become obese), puts make-up, takes her purse and starts pacing up and down in her room as if she was still on the sidewalk (2).
The only desire that Madame Rosa has left is to die with dignity, thus not being sent to an hospital where she would be at the mercy of doctors who would force her to live a life of a "vegetable".Therefore, she asks Momo to help her die in what she calls her "trou juif" ("Jewish hole"), as she calls her cellar that she has transformed into a hiding place, because, as she puts it at the beginning of the novel, "depuis que je suis sortie d'Auschwitz, il ne m'est arrive que des malheurs" (since I left Auschwitz, I only had bad luck")... She goes down to her refuge from time to time, when she loses her mind and thinks that the French police can still show up at her door and take her to the Vel d'Hiv to send her to the German "foyers".
Here is another aspect of La Vie devant Soi worth noticing: Gary, through Momo's voice, gives a crude and caustic version of History. Here is how Momo tries to sum up the Shoah:

Madame Rosa, quand elle avait toute sa tete, m'avait souvent parle comment monsieur Hitler avait fait un Israel juif en Allemagne pour leur donner un foyer et comment ils ont tous ete accueillis dans ce foyer sauf les dents, les os, les vetements et les souliers en bon etat a cause du gaspillage"

"madame Rosa, when she has all her mind, would often tell me how mister Hitler had made a Jewish Israel in Germany to give them a "foyer" ["foyer" in French means both "home" and "fireplace"...] and how they all had been welcome in this foyer except for the teeth, bones, clothes and shoes in good shape for fear of wasting"

We also find in this novel Gary's love for the outsiders, people broken or so different that they can't fit anywhere but in the neighborhood of Belleville, mostly populated by Arabs, Africans, Jews. Colorful characters inhabit the novel, like Madame Lola, a former Senegalese wrestler turned into a drag queen with a big heart; or Monsieur N'da Amedee, an illiterate pimp who asks madame Rosa to write his letters to his family back in Cameroon; letters in which he says he is studying civil engineering... The Belleville neighborhood created by Gary is hardly realistic, it is more a contemporary and Parisian version of the shtetl from the yiddish folkstales. The other Parisians,  the "French", only appear later on in the novel and I won't say anything about it since I don't want to spoil the end for those who haven't read it yet.


When the novel was published in 1975, almost nobody had a clue that Gary was its true author. Most of the critics believed the fable that Gary had imagined: that Emile Ajar was his nephew's pseudonym and that yes, the young writer was indeed very talented. The very few among the critics that felt something was wrong were tempted to attribute the novel to Raymond Queneau, but nobody thought of Romain Gary as the true writer. Even when the novel was awarded the prix Goncourt, he continued the farce and his nephew, although reluctantly, kept pretending to be Emile Ajar. It is only after his suicide that the fraud was revealed in a posthumous text: Vie et mort d'Emile Ajar (life and death of emile Ajar), in which Gary tells the whole story.
It seems hard, now, when looking back, to not be stricken by the similitude in the style and topics between the novels signed Gary and those signed Ajar (4 novels: Gros-calin, La vie devant soi, l'angoisse du roi Salomon, Pseudo); of course there are differences but the soul is the same; it is the same disillusioned irony, the same love for the humanity and the same rage, anger at her endurable ability to self-destruction. 
 Through the mask of Emile Ajar, Gary reinvents himself one last time as a young and promising writer (he is 61 when La Vie devant soi is published); may be as an attempt to escape his own dibbuks.

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[1] Gary writes in his romanced autobiography La Promesse de l’Aube that, although he seemed to be a gifted young painter, her mother had him quit completely this art when she learnt about Van Gogh…
(2) "Je vous jure que Madame Rosa a poil, avec des bottes de cuir et des culottes noires en dentelle autour du cou, parce qu'elle s'etait trompee de cote [...]je vous jure que c'est quelque chose qu'on peut pas voir ailleurs [...]." (I swear that seeing Mrs Rosa naked, with her leather boots and some black underwear around the neck because she got confused, I swear it is something you can't see anywhere else)