What do you think?
Rate this book
Le Jeune homme vert #2
Les vingt ans du jeune homme vert
In this sequel to the acclaimed novel The Foundling Boy, Michel Déon's hero comes to manhood and learns about desire and possession, sex and love, and the nuances of allegiance that war necessitates.
In the aftermath of French defeat in July 1940, twenty-year-old Jean Arnaud and his ally, the charming conman Palfy, are hiding out at a brothel in Clermont-Ferrand, having narrowly escaped a firing squad. At a military parade, Jean falls for a beautiful stranger, Claude, who will help him forget his adolescent heartbreak but bring far more serious troubles of her own.
Having safely reached occupied Paris, the friends mingle with art smugglers and forgers, social climbers, showbiz starlets, bluffers, swindlers, and profiteers, French and German, as Jean learns to make his way in a world of murky allegiances. But beyond the social whirl, the war cannot stay away forever. . . .
In the aftermath of French defeat in July 1940, twenty-year-old Jean Arnaud and his ally, the charming conman Palfy, are hiding out at a brothel in Clermont-Ferrand, having narrowly escaped a firing squad. At a military parade, Jean falls for a beautiful stranger, Claude, who will help him forget his adolescent heartbreak but bring far more serious troubles of her own.
Having safely reached occupied Paris, the friends mingle with art smugglers and forgers, social climbers, showbiz starlets, bluffers, swindlers, and profiteers, French and German, as Jean learns to make his way in a world of murky allegiances. But beyond the social whirl, the war cannot stay away forever. . . .
576 pages, Pocket Book
First published January 1, 1977
3 people are currently reading
170 people want to read
About the author
Michel Déon
106 books27 followersMichel Déon was a French novelist and playwright. He adopted the nom de plume Michel Déon, and made it his official name in octobre 1965. He has published over 50 works and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Interallié for his 1970 novel, Les Poneys sauvages (The Wild Ponies). Déon's 1973 novel Un taxi mauve received the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.
In 1978, Déon was elected to the Académie française. Déon is an affiliate member of the Portuguese Academy of Science and Letters. He is a doctor honoris causa at the universities of Athens and Ireland. He is also an honorary citizen of Nice, Aix-en-Provence, and Antibes. His works have been translated into many languages.
Déon and his wife Chantal raised their two children, Alice and Alexandre, on the small Greek island of Spetsai. When the children reached school age in 1968, France was in a state of upheaval. The Déon family settled in Ireland. For over forty years, Déon and his family have made Ireland their home, raising Chantal's fifty horses.
In 1978, Déon was elected to the Académie française. Déon is an affiliate member of the Portuguese Academy of Science and Letters. He is a doctor honoris causa at the universities of Athens and Ireland. He is also an honorary citizen of Nice, Aix-en-Provence, and Antibes. His works have been translated into many languages.
Déon and his wife Chantal raised their two children, Alice and Alexandre, on the small Greek island of Spetsai. When the children reached school age in 1968, France was in a state of upheaval. The Déon family settled in Ireland. For over forty years, Déon and his family have made Ireland their home, raising Chantal's fifty horses.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 30, 2016
I enjoyed The Foundling Boy by Michel Déon, (see my review) but this sequel is not quite as successful. It is, as the title and the book cover suggest, a continuation of the life of Jean Arnaud who comes of age as France capitulates to Germany during World War II. Most of my reading of fiction about this period has tended to explore evil and the struggle to deal with it, so I found this book a little wanting. Amoral adventures and a disdain for politics that seem somewhat charming in adolescence resonate differently when life gets serious under a jackboot, or so it seems to me.
But I wasn’t just disappointed by Jean’s scant attention to the Occupation and its pro-Nazi offshoot in Vichy. The sentimental education of a boy that seemed life-affirming in the first novel seems a little over-worked here: it’s too long, too improbable and sometimes too confusing because (even though I read The Foundling Boy only recently) the plentiful characters from the first novel reappear without timely explanation. Jean went to bed, or wanted to, with quite a few women in The Foundling Boy, but in the sequel I lost track of which women were relations and which were former lovers. And although Jean has two fathers and two mothers in The Foundling Boy it was easy to keep them separate because the peripatetic biological parents were both flamboyant characters while the stay-at-home adoptive parents were stoic and rather dull; in the sequel since they are all offstage almost all the time, the occasional references to them had me floundering sometimes (especially in the case of Antoine, his lovers and his other children).
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/01/10/th...
But I wasn’t just disappointed by Jean’s scant attention to the Occupation and its pro-Nazi offshoot in Vichy. The sentimental education of a boy that seemed life-affirming in the first novel seems a little over-worked here: it’s too long, too improbable and sometimes too confusing because (even though I read The Foundling Boy only recently) the plentiful characters from the first novel reappear without timely explanation. Jean went to bed, or wanted to, with quite a few women in The Foundling Boy, but in the sequel I lost track of which women were relations and which were former lovers. And although Jean has two fathers and two mothers in The Foundling Boy it was easy to keep them separate because the peripatetic biological parents were both flamboyant characters while the stay-at-home adoptive parents were stoic and rather dull; in the sequel since they are all offstage almost all the time, the occasional references to them had me floundering sometimes (especially in the case of Antoine, his lovers and his other children).
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/01/10/th...
April 16, 2024
The further adventures of Jean Arnaud set against the back drop of occupied France during WW2. In this book he becomes a man. The novel is packed full of characters who shape Jean’s life, big or small. Some we love, some we dislike, some are intriguing. I love the author’s conceit of telling his readers, as an aside, what becomes of many of these characters even if they disappear from the main narrative. Our hero finds love, but with two very different women and at the same time. Claude is fragile with secrets while Nelly is a free spirit and great fun. We finally leave Jean, after all his adventures, realising that he is “finally not a little boy anymore”.
July 12, 2017
A rambling and disappointing sequel
May 9, 2018
not as good as the first volume but with enough stuff to keep me reading (slowly and in chunks though) and with a reasonably good ending
September 21, 2016
Enjoyment of Michel Déon’s French take on Tom Jones, a rambling account of the foundling boy Jean Arnaud’s adventures, which end mid-stream with his departure for the Front on the outbreak of WW2, in the company of conman Palfy, gave me sufficient enthusiasm to start on the sequel – but this proved a disappointment, with all the shortcomings of the first novel magnified in spades. Déon has been praised and honoured for his straightforward prose style as opposed to Sartre’s intellectual existentialism, but the novel is far too sprawling and long-drawn-out.
The thin plot is dominated by Jean’s infatuation with Claude, a beautiful young married woman with a small child and mysterious absent husband. Portrayed as pure and virtuous, she effectively strings Jean along, accepting his moral support, claiming to love him, even letting him into her bed, but for a long time denying him sexual intercourse. Perhaps fulfilling the male author’s fantasy, Jean “has his cake and eats it” by enjoying in parallel a “no strings attached” physical relationship with film actress Nelly Tristan, transformed in his company from a foul-mouthed, tippling social embarrassment into a sensitive declaimer of sentimental French poetry.
The weak storyline is padded out with lengthy recollections of events from the previous novel or with tedious scenes which often seem quite pointless. Déon’s claim that it is possible to understand this sequel without reading the first book is a little misleading: those taking him at his word are likely to become confused over details of Jean’s parentage and his first loves, like Chantal.
Whereas some interesting characters were developed in the first book, like Jean’s restless grandfather Antoine and the village curate, the sequel is dominated by too many exaggerated and generally unappealing caricatures: Palfy, with his network of louche friends and lack of compunction over fraternising with Nazis; the “ultra-respectable” brothel keeper Madame Michette with her bizarre mix of gullibility and guile, and fantasies of being a spy; Jesus, the Spanish painter with the irritating lisp who is prepared to sell his artistic soul for money and avoid commitment until his sudden falling for “enemy German” Laura, or La Garenne, the crooked dealer in art porn. The lesser characters are mainly bland ciphers. There is little sense of place, like the lure of the South of France for Antoine in his Bugatti (previous novel).
In the first book, Déon sometimes revealed himself as an intrusive narrator, over-anxious to reveal future events. In the sequel, this tendency has run out of control, as he even destroys the tension of the two most dramatic, all too rare, incidents by digressing into what lies in store. He keeps giving us potted histories, often in the form of letters, rather than taking the trouble to develop characters and weave events into the plot. This seems like lazy writing. He consistently “tells” rather than “shows”, bludgeoning us into what we should think, with often heavy-handed philosophising, rather than let us experience events directly and form our own judgements.
Just occasionally, there are flickers of insight, as when the narrator (better still if it could have been a character) observes how the isolation caused by war blunts the impact of a tragic event through the delay in receiving it. At one point, Jean actually reflects on the contrast between the simple, honest couple who are sheltering him, and the “artificial et brilliant” life he has been leading.
Handsome, charming, easy-going Jean has always tended to consort with raffish characters, but it is troubling to see him frittering away his time in the company of wheeler-dealer Nazis and collaborators on the make. Although a contrast to many WW2 novels, perhaps in some ways more realistic to see the Occupation of France from this viewpoint, I felt uneasy about the shallow, cynical glossing over the hardship of those who refused to or could not profit from the Occupation, the suffering and risk taken by members of the Resistance and the mistreatment of French Jews, as at the Vel d’Hiv.
Apart from providing a means of practising my French, the novel often bored me, and seems to have to been still further weakened in translation.
The thin plot is dominated by Jean’s infatuation with Claude, a beautiful young married woman with a small child and mysterious absent husband. Portrayed as pure and virtuous, she effectively strings Jean along, accepting his moral support, claiming to love him, even letting him into her bed, but for a long time denying him sexual intercourse. Perhaps fulfilling the male author’s fantasy, Jean “has his cake and eats it” by enjoying in parallel a “no strings attached” physical relationship with film actress Nelly Tristan, transformed in his company from a foul-mouthed, tippling social embarrassment into a sensitive declaimer of sentimental French poetry.
The weak storyline is padded out with lengthy recollections of events from the previous novel or with tedious scenes which often seem quite pointless. Déon’s claim that it is possible to understand this sequel without reading the first book is a little misleading: those taking him at his word are likely to become confused over details of Jean’s parentage and his first loves, like Chantal.
Whereas some interesting characters were developed in the first book, like Jean’s restless grandfather Antoine and the village curate, the sequel is dominated by too many exaggerated and generally unappealing caricatures: Palfy, with his network of louche friends and lack of compunction over fraternising with Nazis; the “ultra-respectable” brothel keeper Madame Michette with her bizarre mix of gullibility and guile, and fantasies of being a spy; Jesus, the Spanish painter with the irritating lisp who is prepared to sell his artistic soul for money and avoid commitment until his sudden falling for “enemy German” Laura, or La Garenne, the crooked dealer in art porn. The lesser characters are mainly bland ciphers. There is little sense of place, like the lure of the South of France for Antoine in his Bugatti (previous novel).
In the first book, Déon sometimes revealed himself as an intrusive narrator, over-anxious to reveal future events. In the sequel, this tendency has run out of control, as he even destroys the tension of the two most dramatic, all too rare, incidents by digressing into what lies in store. He keeps giving us potted histories, often in the form of letters, rather than taking the trouble to develop characters and weave events into the plot. This seems like lazy writing. He consistently “tells” rather than “shows”, bludgeoning us into what we should think, with often heavy-handed philosophising, rather than let us experience events directly and form our own judgements.
Just occasionally, there are flickers of insight, as when the narrator (better still if it could have been a character) observes how the isolation caused by war blunts the impact of a tragic event through the delay in receiving it. At one point, Jean actually reflects on the contrast between the simple, honest couple who are sheltering him, and the “artificial et brilliant” life he has been leading.
Handsome, charming, easy-going Jean has always tended to consort with raffish characters, but it is troubling to see him frittering away his time in the company of wheeler-dealer Nazis and collaborators on the make. Although a contrast to many WW2 novels, perhaps in some ways more realistic to see the Occupation of France from this viewpoint, I felt uneasy about the shallow, cynical glossing over the hardship of those who refused to or could not profit from the Occupation, the suffering and risk taken by members of the Resistance and the mistreatment of French Jews, as at the Vel d’Hiv.
Apart from providing a means of practising my French, the novel often bored me, and seems to have to been still further weakened in translation.
July 12, 2016
Um, It's not you, it's me.
I really did try with this book, but I don't think I was in the right place for it. Perhaps it's good to lose yourself in a big book when life has done its best to pull every possible rug from under your feet, but in my case maybe it's not such a great idea.
So Monsieur Deon, I apologize for the three stars because it probably deserves more but I just couldn't concentrate enough to get to know the cast of characters walking on and off your pages. I loved the first book - really loved it, which does make me think... it's not you - it's me.
Perhaps I'm just going to have to give myself more time to get over my lovely dad not being around anymore before I pick up anything too demanding.
In the meantime I'll try to lose myself in my own writing; somehow that works.
I really did try with this book, but I don't think I was in the right place for it. Perhaps it's good to lose yourself in a big book when life has done its best to pull every possible rug from under your feet, but in my case maybe it's not such a great idea.
So Monsieur Deon, I apologize for the three stars because it probably deserves more but I just couldn't concentrate enough to get to know the cast of characters walking on and off your pages. I loved the first book - really loved it, which does make me think... it's not you - it's me.
Perhaps I'm just going to have to give myself more time to get over my lovely dad not being around anymore before I pick up anything too demanding.
In the meantime I'll try to lose myself in my own writing; somehow that works.
April 20, 2016
The sequel to the rather charming The Foundling Boy, The Foundling’s War takes up the story of Jean Arnaud in 1940, just after the fall of France. Jean makes his way back to Paris where he has to learn how to manoeuvre through life in a very changed world under German occupation. Unfortunately this sequel has very little of the charm of the earlier book. It’s too picaresque, with too many characters and too many boyish escapades which are rather inappropriate in a period when atrocities were occurring just a jackboot away. All in all a somewhat frivolous and rather tedious approach to a very serious era.
March 23, 2016
A continuation of the life, love and maturing of Jean during the German occupation of France. I call the story a tidal one. It ebbed and flowed. There were parts that were as engaging as the "The Foundling Boy" and there were parts that were a bit flat.
The first third of the book was the most amusing, the last third the best as Paul learnt how to manage his emotions, friendships and need for independence.
As with "The Foundling Boy" there are a cast of characters that are all a bit eccentric (but isn't everyone). I did not get the man in the woods. Otherwise a very enjoyable read.
The first third of the book was the most amusing, the last third the best as Paul learnt how to manage his emotions, friendships and need for independence.
As with "The Foundling Boy" there are a cast of characters that are all a bit eccentric (but isn't everyone). I did not get the man in the woods. Otherwise a very enjoyable read.
August 13, 2023
I didn't enjoy it as much as The Foundling Boy. For a long time there was no sense of progress. Maybe that's how it was in France during the war. It all seemed to fizzle out at the end. Maybe I'm missing lots of symbolism and things. Nobody turned out to be a particularly heroic character as far as I could tell and the whole thing about Claude seemed unlikely. Antoine was the most engaging character in the first book and this book comes to life most when the action moves to the south of France. Maybe there was going to be a third book if the author had lived longer.
February 21, 2022
Hard to read for me. Have been reading it in pieces. Certainly a book I can put down. But am intrigued how it will end.
Well that, for me , was a very tough read.
Not a book I will attempt again.
It had interesting sections, but too few and far between.
I kept getting confused with the characters. Mainly because some of the French female names are male names in English, and vice versa. Especially Claude and Jean :-)
Well that, for me , was a very tough read.
Not a book I will attempt again.
It had interesting sections, but too few and far between.
I kept getting confused with the characters. Mainly because some of the French female names are male names in English, and vice versa. Especially Claude and Jean :-)
January 2, 2015
This book took me a little while to get into, but could be due to not reading the previous book 'The Foundling Boy'. I was lucky to have won this book on the Goodreads Giveaway.
July 9, 2015
Fascinating that the works by Deon were never translated for they certainly are treasures for the more mature audience and people with some "Europe" in them.
July 13, 2021
Once again I had to get used to the author's style so it was a bit slow going to start with. However, once our hero was on his adventures with or without the notorious Palfy, it became a page-turner.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews