Last times - Victor Serge

Last Times, Victor Serge's epic novel of the Fall of France is based-like much of his fiction-on first-hand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris (June 1940) and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a persecuted, stateless Russian, and participated in the early French Resistance before escaping on the last ship to the Americas in 1941. Exiled in Mexico City, Serge poured his recent experience into a fast-moving, gripping novel aimed at an American audience, and it was published in New York in 1946. Along with sharply drawn characters, dramatic scenes, and physical action, the novel presents a compelling evocation of the atmosphere of that time and place, based on keen observation and an enormous talent for description. It's a near-forgotten classic of the era. Serge creates a haunting panorama of a near-deserted Paris abandoned by the government. The reader follows his protagonists, anti-fascist refugees, through the last days of Europe's deserted cultural capital as the sound of gunfire moves into the suburbs. With them, the reader joins the flood of Belgian and French refugees fleeing south on foot, in cars loaded with household goods, on bikes, pushing carts and prams under the strafing Stukas. Serge next brings to life wartime Marseille, its great harbour closed by the war, with its undergrounds, rackets and prostitution, its Vichy officialdom and fascist Militias, its collaborationists, its early resisters, its crowds of desperate refugees competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last-hoped-for-ship to the new world.