The Cattle Car

In this first English translation of Georges Hyvernaud's autobiographical novel The Cattle Car, the narrator, who has come back to France after imprisonment in Germany, is preoccupied with the near impossibility of writing a novel about his experiences. At the same time, he attempts to function normally in a world that seems to have changed radically. Bouncing back and forth from the existential hell of postwar France to the truer one he endured during the war, the narrator works on his memoir, "The Cattle Car" while struggling as a laborer in a monotonous life lived amidst mediocre people. The book also includes "Letter to a Little Girl," Hyvernaud's eloquent open letter to his daughter describing his wartime imprisonment.