Confidence Africaine

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1937, Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) described himself as "an independent writer who has escaped the fascination of partisan ideologies, an investigator as objective as is humanly possible, as well as a novelist striving to express the tragic quality of individual lives." His work is in the tradition of the nineteenth century realists and naturalists. His reputation as a major writer was established in 1913 with Jean Barois, and confirmed by Les Thibaults, a roman fleuve whose eight parts appeared over the years 1922-1940. They are uncommon skills that Martin du Gard displays in Confidence Africaine, where the difficult theme of incest - so apt to elude the author's control, in the reader so apt to provoke confused responses - is managed with quiet mastery and seeming effortlessness.