Love Without Resistance - Rozier Gilles

Where had he been since the Armistice? Demobilized? A prisoner in Germany? I had often dreamed of him. Naked, standing at attention, clutching my translations in his hands at groin level. My fingers traced the hollow of his shoulder, his chest—firm as a horse’s cheek—and his belly; my index finger circled and circled the rim of the hollow, dipping into his navel, my filed, pointed fingernail grazing his slightly pebbled skin, the caress drifting down toward his hips and buttocks. The soldier remained at attention—on the captain’s orders—despite his nakedness and my caresses, showing only a slight quiver of the lip, undeterred by the defeat or the Occupation. That was in my dreams. I thought I would never see him again, yet there he was—at the very moment I was waiting for the Roulieres—standing in the middle of the Gestapo corridor. Through the portrait of a German teacher whose life is upended by love for a Jewish soldier, Gilles Rozier’s third novel traverses a France devoid of Resistance, surrendered to History and a constellation of desires hovering between ambiguous heroism and passivity. Driven by a sharp, subtle dramatic tension, the book maps out a unique erotic realm where two antagonistic languages—Yiddish and German—are drawn to one another through the medium of two bodies, revealing their explosive similarities.