The Glory of My Father (1957)

Summary

A little Marseillais from a century ago: elementary school; the family cocoon; the first vacations in the hills, at La Treille; the first hunt with his father…

When he started writing his childhood memories, in the middle of the fifties, Marcel Pagnol was moving away from cinema, and the theater was no longer smiling at him.

La Gloire de mon père, upon its publication in 1957, was hailed as marking the advent of a great prose writer. Joseph, the schoolteacher father, Augustine, the timid mother, Uncle Jules, Aunt Rose, and little brother Paul, immediately become as popular as Marius, César, or Panisse. And the scene of the hunting of the bartavelle is immediately transformed into an elementary school dictation…

Pagnol’s memories are a bit like those of all children in the world. Later, it is said, Pagnol would have wanted them to be made into a film. It was Yves Robert who, long after the writer’s death, directed it.

“I was born in the city of Aubagne. Under the Garlaban tree crowned with goats in the time of the last goatherds”.