You still have life ahead of you
You have life ahead of you (original title: La vie devant soi ) is a novel published in 1975 by Romain Gary under the pseudonym Emile Ajar . He was awarded the Prix Goncourt that same year .
action
Fourteen-year-old Mohammed, called Momo, lives with Madame Rosa, an old Jew who survived Auschwitz , in the Belleville district of Paris . His father had left it here many years ago. He's not the only kid there. Most of the children Rosa raises come from prostitutes who send money for them. Momo gets by as best he can. And as Madame Rosa gets older and her condition deteriorates dramatically, he has been with her for the last few days.
The novel is written in the first person. Momo has as much education as he drew from talking to Madame Rosa, neighbors and friends from Belleville . For the reader this means an encounter with the mind and perspective of a small, innocent boy growing up in misery. Of course, Momo only knows his world; it is the world of hookers, transvestites, orphans, Africans and Arabs. He knows so much about Madame Rosa that she is Jewish because there was once something with a Monsieur Hitler, she is still afraid of the Gestapo and she has no papers because papers can always be dangerous to you. He knows about himself from Madame Rosa that she received him as “Mohammed, hence a Muslim”.
One day his birth father is at the door and wants to see his son. Madame Rosa, who loves Momo and doesn't want to give him away for anything in the world, is present enough at this moment not to betray Momo; so she claims to have mistakenly switched his son and that Moïse, raised as a Jew, is his child. The man suddenly dies from this information. Momo now knows that he is actually four years older than he previously thought and that his mother Aïcha was killed by his father, who was not sent to prison for this, but was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
As Madame Rosa's health continues to deteriorate, he tries to save her from being kept unconscious like vegetables in the hospital. He told everyone who asked him that Madame Rosa would be fetched from Israel by relatives . In fact, Momo and Madame Rosa, who mobilizes her last strength, go into their "Jewish hiding place" in the cellar. Madame Rosa dies there. Momo refuses to admit it for days, puts make-up and perfumes on her, but at some point everything comes out and Momo can tell his true story.
Film adaptations
The first and better known film adaptation was published in November 1977 as "La Vie devant soi", in English and German in 1978 as " Madame Rosa ", by Moshé Mizrahi with Simone Signoret as the leading actress. In 1978 the work received the Oscar for "best foreign language film" in the USA. In 1978 Signoret received the César as "best actress" for this role .
In 2010, after a theatrical version by Xavier Jallard and a screenplay by and with Myriam Boyer , who had already shone in the theater in the leading role of Madame Rosa, a remake for television was created, this time both directing and again the leading role. This version was first broadcast on December 22, 2010 on ARTE .
Trivia
The character of Momo has similarities with the son Diego Gary (* 1963) from the marriage of Romain Gary and Jean Seberg. After the parents divorced, the son was raised by a Spanish housekeeper in the house they shared.
The award of the Prix Goncourt for You've Got Life Before You led to one of the greatest scandals in French literary history, because Romain Gary had already received this award under his own name for The Roots of Heaven in 1956 . The rules of the Prix Goncourt prohibit an author from being awarded this prize more than once.
Motifs of You have the life ahead of you can be found in Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt's Monsieur Ibrahim and the flowers of the Koran (original title: Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ), which has led to corresponding allegations of plagiarism. (see web links).
expenditure
The German National Bibliography lists a total of 17 German-language editions in 2008 in the translation by Eugen Helmlé , as well as one Danish (this one under the French title). There are also 2 editions only under the real name Romain Gary: Diana-Verlag 2002 ISBN 3453195868 & ibid. 2003 ISBN 3453881567 .
- Émile Ajar: You still have life ahead of you. Novel. Verlag Volk und Welt , Berlin 1978
- An edition in French for school purposes was published in Germany in 2007: Klett, Stuttgart ISBN 3-12-597269-8
- Non-commercial audio book: Daisy CD No. H 4506, 402 minutes, available from DZB , (in German)
- Audio book in French: CD, Gallimard, Paris 2004. Voices Bernadette Lafont, narrator Kamel Belghazi. Ecoutez series, lire. EAN 3260050672689
- New translation
- Übers. Christoph Roeber: Romain Gary , you have life before you. Rotpunktverlag , Zurich 2017
Web links
- The Life Before Us in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Same motif strands and similar people in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt in Monsieur Ibrahim and the flowers of the Koran
- Gary's vita, content of the novel, analysis, detailed presentation. In French
- Playing with a broken heart , Der Spiegel from June 23, 2008
- Anne Morange ( Memento of July 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 4.4 MB): Le dépassement des limites. Expérience de soi, expérience de l'écriture dans les récits d'apprentissage de Gary-Ajar. Diss. Phil. (Littérature française) Université Charles de Gaulle 2006