Love in the Days of Rage

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Book Overview

"The more I make love, the more I want revolution; the more I make revolution, the more I want to make love." In Paris, in May of 1968, revolution, and love are very much in the air. The barricades are going up, the students of the Sorbonne are taking to streets alive with the graffiti of revolt, and the Odeon is ablaze with speechmaking. For Annie, a young American painter, and Julian, her Portuguese lover, a banker and anarchist, the events of that Paris spring form the backdrop against which their love affair is played. Annie sees the world through an artist's eyes; she is reckless in her passions, wanting and needing love with other people. There is none of this fanciful nonsense for Julian, an anarchist disdainful of the entire human race, who thinks even the enraged students storming the streets of Paris with their posters proclaiming "open the windows of your heart" and "revolution is the ecstasy of history" to be hopelessly na ve and sheeplike. Ferlinghetti charts the progress of love unfolding against those heady and momentous days when the pampered children of the bourgeoisie tried to find common cause with workers who despised them, "when Julian and Annie were in the heat of their love and reason."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585672025
• ISBN13: 9781585672028
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Overlook Press
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A Lyrical Novella by a 1960's Beat Poet

This is a short novel with a lyric quality similar to a poem. As far as I know, this is Ferlinghetti's only novel since his works of poetry in the 1960's. It is a story about two lovers who meet in Paris in the 1960's amidst the student revolution. She is a true revolutionary. He's a banker but swears to be an anarchist working for the revolution on his own. The story line is thin. The love scenes are beautifully wrought - - an impressionist painting in words. "His body stirred and floated away, borne away by foreign currents, by alien gulf streams it seemed impossible to swim against, his body broke the surface and disappeared into the very heart of light, while she sank back and back, through the deep swirling waters, into the deep pearl, the final mystery . . . When she awoke, he was gone. (p. 39)