Colonfay Author: Myles O'Grady  E-mail this product to a friend

Colonfay is the village and the house; fay from the Latin fagus, meaning beech; colon, a corruption of colombe, meaning dove. But in this unknown corner of northern France, the dove of peace has been slain, and there is a blood-soaked cedar of Lebanon; a tree under which adults are killed and children are sexually abused. This is what it is like the Occupied France, a story set against a background of violence in a country divided. Here are normally decent people warped by adherence to reactional social attitudes; blind to evil and guilty of collaborating in the worst Nazi crimes. Yet honor is sometimes salvaged by individual acts of conscience-driven bravery within the family. The legacy of a European century compressed into a week of alienation and conflict... An old man, Armand, is dying, while his daughter, Laure, emotionally dead, comes to life, liberated sexually by her American lover, but not totally emancipated from her nightmares of sexual interference as a child. Her husband, Dermot, an outsider, unable to provide the key to escape from the prison of her background, seeks his own animal release in the orgastic company of another woman. In this fictional biography, which he describes as his catharsis, Myles O'Grady gives meaning to Philip Larkin's poem,