Odd Man Out

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, by Alice Kaplan (Chicago, 308 pp., $25)

ON February 6, 1945—after Paris was liberated but while World War II was still raging—Robert Brasillach, the French writer and pro-Nazi polemicist, was executed by a firing squad for collaboration with the enemy. Brasillach wrote novels, poetry, criticism, and drama, but much of his work is forgotten, and most of it is not available in English. Why then should a biography appear more than half a century after his death?

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George Jochnowitz

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The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, by Alice Kaplan (Chicago, 308 pp., $25)

ON February 6, 1945—after Paris was liberated but while World War II was still raging—Robert Brasillach, the French writer and pro-Nazi polemicist, was executed by a firing squad for collaboration with the enemy. Brasillach wrote novels, poetry, criticism, and drama, but much of his work is forgotten, and most of it is not available in English. Why then should a biography appear more than half a century after his death?