![[BOOK REVIEW] Promise at Dawn by Romain Gary](https://www.reactionchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/promise-at-dawn.jpg)
Original Title: La promesse de l’aube
Finished reading: October 10, 2016
If you’re looking for a haunting and beautifully written sad novel, you won’t go wrong on this one. Why this book didn’t get a Nobel was beyond me!
This is an autobiography of the late French writer Romain Kacew, better known as Romain Gary. He wrote this biography as a tribute to his mother . Her love for him conquered poverty, illness, discrimination and war. It propelled him towards becoming everything her mother dreamed of — a French ambassador, a pilot and above all, a great writer.
This book encompasses anecdotes of war, of obstinate survival and of a kept promise overdue so early.
It is wrong to have been loved so much so young, so early. At the dawn of life, you thus acquire a bad habit, the worst habit there is: the habit of being loved. You can’t get rid of it. You believe that you have it in you, that you have it in you to be loved, that it is your due, that it will always be there around you, that it can always be found again, that the world owes it to you and you keep looking, thirsting, summoning, until you find yourself on the beach at Big Sur, with only your brother the ocean, and his tortured tumult, with only your brother the ocean able to understand your heart.
excerpt from Promise At Dawn by Romain Gary
