Departures: Memoirs. By Paul Zweig.

"I've never been much good at transitions. Over the years, I have gone as if expelled, dragged or broken from one life to another, never quite willing or knowing. It has been all zigzags, changes that sprang from nowhere and became irreversible, as if I had been shunted onto another plane of life, never choosing and never prepared."

Paul Zweig is a Jew born in America, a little after WWII. Already as a child, he doesn't consider himself as a 'real American' neither as a 'real Jew.' All his life will be spent in this quest of his self, and for that matter, he will voyage through the earth to find out who he really is.

 Paul Zweig. Dead in 1984.

Departures: Memoirs is in part a rewriting of one of his earlier novel named Three Journeys, and a memoir of his life spent in departures. Against all odds, Zweig is writing on his death's bed for is relatives, especially for his daughter, but as readers, we could have think that he would have been more modest in his writing; instead, the readers can sense the fertility, the sexuality of Paris has never we can sense it now. An enormous part of his memoirs is about sex, his penis and his loneliness. 

"But an anxious solitude possessed me. I felt numb, alone with my lanky thighs, my belly that was already a little domed, my chest hairs and my clotted curls of public hair; alone with my penis that had retracted and become insignificant, like one of those marginal outcast boys with fat unhealthy faces in my classes in elementary school."

What is really interesting about Zweig is his ability to throw all his self in his quest of the French language:

"I decided that I was going to read all of French literature, starting at the beginning."

And the reader can feel his difficulties, that he finishes to overcome language, and masters it: winning the battle, becoming the other. His memoirs are truly the immersion of an expatriate man, in the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, who senses he never has a homeland.

The second interesting fact about this book is Zweig's implication in the Algerian war. I will not say much about that, because I would like you to read all his nostalgia about life and death, about the known and the unknown, love and hate, peace and war. The last chapter made me wept... This is just to say that this book's worth reading.

Recommended if you love memoirs and if you are interested to know more about France in the mid-1950s.