Bad Faith: A History of Family and Fatherland

Description

The story of one of history's most despicable villians told by a brilliant author - shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Bad Faith tells the story of one of history's most despicable villains and conmen - Louis Darquier, Nazi collaborator and 'Commissioner for Jewish Affairs', who dissembled his way to power in the Vichy government and was responsible for sending thousands of children to the gas chambers. After the war he left France, never to be brought to justice. Early on in his career Louis married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of fantasy and deception, and together they had a child, Anne whom they abandoned in England. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. In Carmen Callil's masterful, elegiac and sometimes darkly comic account, Darquier's rise during the years leading up to the Second World War mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism. Epic, haunting, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study in powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Carmen Callil was born and educated in Melbourne, Australia, and came to the UK in 1960. In 1972 she founded Virago and ten years later became Managing Director of Chatto & Windus. In 1994 she was awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Sheffield, York, Oxford Brookes and The Open University. In 1996 she chaired the judging panel of the Booker Prize. She is the author (with Colm Toibin) of The Modern Library- The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950. She lives in London.

A superb exploration of the fractured mind of French anti-Semitism -- Simon Heffer * Literary Review * The story she has uncovered is so strange and powerful that it would be an unusual reader who was not profoundly moved -- Kathryn Hughes * Mail on Sunday * A work of phenomenally thorough, generous and humane scholarship....Callil understands anguish, and lays bare its causes with clarity and precision. Bad Faith exemplifies what Primo Levi called the 'continuous intellectual and moral effort' that is the only adequate response to the events described here -- Hilary Spurling * Daily Telegraph * Bad Faith is a book of passion and anger which, nonetheless, manages to keep its head as a significant work of history -- Mark Bostridge * Independent on Sunday * We cannot know what Anne Darquier would have thought of Callil's book, but my guess is that she would have been as moved, astonished and impressed as any other reader -- Ruth Scurr * The Times *