This slim novel — titled Une jeunesse in the French original and Young Once in English — opens as a thirty-fifth birthday celebration for Odile is winding down. She and her husband Louis have run a children’s home in a village at the foot of the Alps for a dozen years, but now that their own children are growing up they have decided to close that down and start a new chapter in their lives. Louis drives a guest who has to catch a train back to Paris to the local station. Once his friend has departed, the rain and the station remind Louis of the time fifteen years previous, the tumultuous first few months with Odile when they were both on their own in Paris, not yet twenty. A youth, their youth, as the French and German titles have it; young once and recalled from early middle age.

The recollection that constitutes the vast majority of the book begins with Louis just finishing his army service in the Norman town of St. Lô. He has come to know a man named Brossier following a chance meeting one weekend in a café when they were the only two customers. On the rainy evening after Louis’ discharge, he encounters Brossier again, who says that the end of Louis’ time as a recruit is worth celebration and insists on buying him some drinks. When Louis eventually admits that he has no immediate prospects, and that he needs new shoes because the ones he has don’t keep out the rain and have left his feet and socks sopping wet, Brossier takes him under his wing and gets him properly outfitted. Louis feels like a new man.

From such small things are lives made. Brossier treats Louis to an entire celebratory evening, gives him some money and tells him that he may have a line on longer-term employment.

For her part, Odile wants to be a singer. Rock and roll is just reaching Paris youth, and Odile is attracted but not audacious or connected enough to get up on such a stage herself. Despite her reticence, a talent scout picks up on her interest and intensity. Bellune is over fifty and works for a record company. He’s out of touch with the spirit of the age, but he’s still giving it a go. Young Once later, and mostly indirectly, reveals that he came to Paris as a refugee, presumably Jewish, from Vienna. He had had success there as a composer, but never matched it in Paris. How he lived through the war years is not stated, but the intensity of his recollections and his distance from the present day mark him as a traumatized survivor. Nevertheless, he sees a spark in Odile and hopes that she can make records for his company.

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