Ramon

Ramon is a product named after the character of the same name in the book by Dominique Fernandez. The book explores the life and work of Ramon, who was born to a traitor father and inherited his name, work, and shame. Ramon's son tries to understand how his father, once a great intellectual, could have been a socialist at thirty-one, a literary critic for a left-wing newspaper at thirty-eight, a fellow traveler of communists at forty, a fascist at forty-three, and a collaborator at forty-six.

To unravel the enigmatic fate of Ramon, Fernandez weaves together three threads. The first is the literary thread, which takes us into the world of Proust, Gide, Mauriac, Paulhan, Céline, Bernanos, Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, Duras, and many others. The second is the political thread, which traces the events in France and Europe from February 6th, 1934, to the Front Populaire, the Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Occupation, and how Ramon was involved in all of them. The third is the private thread, which shows how a profligate Mexican playboy who loves tango and Bugatti briefly makes his French wife, a brilliant woman from a poor teaching family whom he married in 1926, happy, but then makes her miserable for the rest of their lives. Their marital troubles are documented day by day in the wife's private diaries.

These three threads superimposed on each other show how the most intimate events can shape a destiny, giving this book its full romantic dimension.