OK, Joe
Translated by Alice Kaplan
140 pages
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5-1/2 x 8-1/2
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© 2003
"OK, Joe!" the American lieutenant calls out to his driver. He hops into his jeep and heads out through French countryside just liberated from the Nazis. With him is the narrator of this novel, Louis, a Frenchman engaged by the American Army as an interpreter. Louis serves a group of American officers charged with bringing GIs to account for crimes—including rape and murder—against French citizens. The friendly banter of the American soldiers and the beautiful Breton landscape stand in contrast to Louis's task and his growing awareness of the moral failings of the Americans sent to liberate France. For not only must Louis translate the accounts of horrific crimes, he comes to realize that the accused men are almost all African American.
Based on diaries that the author kept during his service as a translator for the U.S. Army in the aftermath of D-Day, OK, Joe follows Louis and the Americans as they negotiate with witnesses, investigate the crimes, and stage the courts-martial. Guilloux has an uncanny ear for the snappy speech of the GIs and a tenderness for the young, unworldly men with whom he spends his days, and, in evocative vignettes and dialogues, he sketches the complex intersection of hope and disillusionment that prevailed after the war. Although the American presence in France has been romanticized in countless books and movies, OK, Joe offers something exceedingly rare: a penetrating French perspective on post-D-Day GI culture, a chronicle of trenchant racism and lost ideals.
Based on diaries that the author kept during his service as a translator for the U.S. Army in the aftermath of D-Day, OK, Joe follows Louis and the Americans as they negotiate with witnesses, investigate the crimes, and stage the courts-martial. Guilloux has an uncanny ear for the snappy speech of the GIs and a tenderness for the young, unworldly men with whom he spends his days, and, in evocative vignettes and dialogues, he sketches the complex intersection of hope and disillusionment that prevailed after the war. Although the American presence in France has been romanticized in countless books and movies, OK, Joe offers something exceedingly rare: a penetrating French perspective on post-D-Day GI culture, a chronicle of trenchant racism and lost ideals.
"This slim and spare tale is delivered by a French narrator recruited as a translator for the U.S. Army in the final weeks of World War II. . . . Translator Alice Kaplan shines a glaring light on a dark corner of our country's past; as she writes in her introduction, 139 of the 181 American soldiers charged with rape during World War II were black. But Guilloux's account succeeds as more than mere historical curiosity. As rendered by Kaplan, the minimalist prose resounds with chilling understatement. . . . The book is culled from personal journals, and the choppy structure shows it; a grander novelist could have spun a tightly plotted epic from Guilloux's moral quagmire. But the telling has integrity, and the story enduring relevance. OK, Joe is a riveting rediscovery."
"Louis Guilloux's short novel OK, Joe, first published in France in 1976, speaks of a different kind of culture shock, that of a middle-aged French writer's experience of the United States Army in a Breton town in August 1944. . . . The same scene is repeated on subsequent days: a black man accused of rape or murder, a conviction and a sentence of jail or death. . . . Kaplan, who ably translated this book, provides grim statistics supporting Guilloux's observation. . . . What makes Guilloux's book so chilling is the narrator's affection for the American officers with whom he works, eats, and shares a bedroom. War has brought them together, but a cultural gap remains."
"Louis Guilloux's work for [the American forces after the liberation of Normandy in 1944] involved interpreting at trials of GIs accused of crimes against the civilian population, including rape and murder, for both of which the penalty was death; and it did not escape Guilloux's notice that most of the defendants were black. The autobiographical novella OK, Joe is a subtle analysis of the mindset that allowed those in authority to see this anomaly, while denying that there was discrimination against black servicemen. . . . Kaplan's very readable English version does convey the slightly dated feel of 1940s American slang, and does justice to a curious and powerful novella. . . ."
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Literature and Literary Criticism: Fiction | Romance Languages
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