By the early 1970s, Romain Gary had established himself as one of France's most popular and prolific novelists, journalists, and memoirists. Feeling that he had been typecast as 'Romain Gary', however, he wrote his next novel under the pseudonym Emile Ajar. His second novel written as "Ajar, Life Before Us", was an instant runaway success, winning the Prix Goncourt and becoming the best-selling French novel of the twentieth century. The Prix Goncourt made people all the keener to identify the real Emile Ajar, and stressed by the furore he had created, Gary fled to Geneva. There, Pseudo, a hoax confession and one of the most alarmingly effective mystifications in all literature, was written at high speed. Writing under double cover, Gary simulated schizophrenia and paranoid delusions while pretending to be Paul Pawlovitch confessing to being Emile Ajar - the author of books Gary himself had written.
"The literary hoax named 'Emile Ajar, ' successfully perpetrated by Romain Gary in the 1970s, was a scandal--less for the element of deception, perhaps, than for that extraordinary, humiliating success. In the first English translation of Ajar''s most demented book, David Bellos has produced a text with all the wild, grating, fingernail against chalkboard squeal of the original. "Hocus Bogus" gets on your nerves, demands that you fling it against the wall in anger and contempt--and if you do it has won the match, defeated you, and will stride off the court in triumph."--Esther Allen, City University of New York
--Esther Allen
Title: Hocus bogus
Subtitle: Romain Gary writing as Emile Ajar
Contributors:
By (author)
Romain Gary
;
Translated by
David Bellos
ISBN 13: 9780300181548
ISBN 10: 030018154X
Publisher: Yale University Press
Imprint: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 24/04/2012
Place of Publication:
New Haven,
United States
Edition:
BIC Subjects:
General & literary fiction
NBS Classification: General & Literary Fiction
Dewey Classification:
843.914
(DC23)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Height: 197mm
Width: 127mm
Weight: 318g