A King Alone

A King Alone

Author	Jean Giono
Original title	Un roi sans divertissement
Language	French
Publisher	Éditions de la Table ronde
Publication date	June 1947
Publication place	France
Pages	285

Un roi sans divertissement (lit. "a king without distraction"), published in English as A King Alone,^[1] is a 1947 novel by the French writer Jean Giono. The narrative is set between 1843 and 1848 in the French Prealps and follows a police officer who discovers unpleasant truths about himself during a murder investigation. It was the first book by Giono to be published after World War II and marks the beginning of a new phase in the author's oeuvre.

The book was the basis for the 1963 film A King Without Distraction, directed by François Leterrier from a screenplay by Giono.^[2]

Origin

Jean Giono was a pacifist and had participated in the journal La Gerbe which was seen with suspicion after World War II. He was imprisoned in 1944 by commissars from the French Resistance and blacklisted by the Conseil national des écrivains.^[3] Un roi sans divertissement was written in the autumn of 1946.^[4] The lyrical prose and humanism of Giono's works from the interwar period were replaced by pessimism and sarcastic humor, which came to characterize many of the author's post-war novels.^[3]

Publication

Published by Éditions de la Table ronde in June 1947, Un roi sans divertissement broke the embargo imposed by the Conseil national des écrivains, becoming Giono's first post-war work. It was subsequently republished by Éditions Gallimard in December of the same year.^[4] Giono later categorized this novel, along with several others from the post-war period, as "chroniques romanesques" or "romantic chronicles."^[5]

In 2019, Alyson Waters translated the novel into English under the title, A King Alone. ^[1]

References

Notes

1. Giono, Jean (2019) [1947]. A King Alone. New York Review Books. ISBN 978-1-68137-310-2.
2. "Un roi sans divertissement". bifi.fr (in French). Cinémathèque Française. Retrieved 2015-04-09.
3. Andrau 2003, pp. 27–28
4. Poirier, Bruno. "Bibliographie des œuvres de Jean Giono". pages.infinit.net (in French). Archived from the original on 2018-01-21. Retrieved 2015-04-09.
5. Andrau 2003, pp. 43–44

Literature

• Andrau, Paule (2003). Un roi sans divertissement - J. Giono (in French). Paris: Bréal. ISBN 2-7495-0199-7.