kabibe game How a ‘National Family Secret in France’ Inspired Her Novel

Updated:2024-10-10 04:09 Views:107

Cécile Desprairies’s novel, “The Propagandistkabibe game,” is full of so many secrets that it’s a wonder she managed to write it at all.

In the first place, the book takes an insider’s perspective on occupied France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, “still a sort of national family secret in France,” Desprairies said.

And it was inspired by Desprairies’s mother, who was herself a propagandist for the Vichy regime and its Nazi leaders — something her family only talked about in the most coded terms.

The secrecy around the issue was such that only after her mother died from a sudden heart attack did Desprairies finally feel free to embark on a career as a historian specializing in the Nazi occupation of France, which lasted from 1940 to 1944. In the same week her mother was buried, Desprairies said, she contacted an editor and signed a contract for her first book, an examination of the places in Paris where the collaboration occurred.

“It was a liberation of energy,” she said of her mother’s death. “It may not be very politically correct to say so, but that was how it felt — at last I had the right to speak up.”

Her debut novel, “The Propagandist,” translated from French by Natasha Lehrer, came to Desprairies after many years working as a historian. The story is told from the perspective of a girl growing up in Paris during the 1960s who attempts to piece together the coded conversations, vituperative outbursts and downright lies of family members who hark back to World War II as the best time of their lives.

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