Group Read, September 2021: Promise at Dawn

Our September group read is Promise at Dawn by Romain Gary. Please join in the read and post any comments on this thread.

I'm in! I've got an electronic copy. I might not start until this weekend though.

I am also in with an electronic copy. I will probably not start it until at least next week sometime.

Mine has arrived in the mail.

I have read the first two chapters of Promise At Dawn. As this is a memoir, I am surprised that it made the 1,001 List. I thought only novels were on it.

>5 DeltaQueen50: Nope, there are a surprising number of non-fiction books on the list. Wild Swans, In Cold Blood, Testament of Youth to name a few. I always found that weird since poetry/Shakespeare didn't make it on.

>6 Yells: Oh, that's right! I forgot about In Cold Blood and Wild Swans both of which I have read. Well, I am enjoying Promise At Dawn, Gary's writing has engaged me and I am in absolute awe of his mother! What a remarkable and scary woman.

I spent the afternoon reading and have finished Promise At Dawn. Overall I really liked the book, although some of Gary's stories seemed a little overdone. His mother was a very remarkable woman - certainly a woman one wouldn't want to cross!

This book is just incredibly charming and lovely. I'm just 50 pages in but am enjoying it so much. I don't know if I've ever read a memoir where I've thought "I wish I'd known this person" but that's how I feel about him. Not so sure about his mother!

I'm about half way through, and am enjoying this memoir quite a bit. I look forward to reading Romain Gary's other book on the list, The Roots of Heaven. I am not sure I would have found this author without the list.

Still reading (slowly) and while there are uncomfortable elements to this book, it is also just hilarious in many parts. I loved the girl who he "mistreated" by making her read all of Proust, and the publisher who sent him a psychoanalysis of his manuscript, by Marie Bonaparte.

And yet there is something quite sad in Gary, like a very funny person sometimes is also, underneath the humor, very sad. He says himself that he loves his own humor, and relies on it; but what is it protecting him from?

I looked him up on Wikipedia to see how accurate this book might be as a memoir. One major thing is missing -- there was a father figure around for much of his childhood! I was also fascinated to discover that he's the only person to have won the Prix de Goncourt two times, because he wrote under a pseudonym and they awarded it to that pseudonym after awarding it to him.