The Three Partisans
Beginning in 1942, the darkest days of World War II, and bringing us to the other side, we are swept along following the missions of three members of the Résistance. A host of characters—collaborators, traitors and the wondrously self-sacrificing, resilient, and brave—join Mike, an American aviator; Robert, an Algerian Jew; and Janine, a widowed Frenchwoman raising a daughter. They survive wounds taken in desert firefights, crash landings, smuggling of downed pilots into Spain, deportation train hijackings, and love in desperate times.
Readers are fortunate to find themselves in the capable hands of this writer. He proves that a long-time screenwriter can create compelling cinematic scenes in prose when he takes on the jobs of wardrobe and set designer in the novel format as well. This much-trodden fictional territory gains new, page-turning life as well as many nuances of courage and feeling the screen has no time for, and a more European sensibility usually missing in American versions. The greatest gift of this book is, as Prologue and Epilogue make clear, that these are the fictionalized real-life accounts Pitoun garnered as a child listening to his father and his old comrades sitting around the cafe over bottles of wine in Pau in the south of France. I highly recommend this book.
