The ogre's laughter

In the early 1960s, in the forest surrounding a small, supposedly peaceful Bavarian town, a terrible drama unfolds, quickly shrouded in secrecy and silence. Paul Marleau is a French teenager spending time in Germany, staying with a correspondent. He meets Clara, the daughter of a former Wehrmacht doctor. Children of peace, they understand that "cracks of war" are spreading through the apparent serenity of their times. Wars believed to be over, or ongoing wars, are never far away. But the years pass. Clara becomes a photographer, and Paul, a sculptor. They are drawn to each other as intensely as they flee from each other, and their paths constantly cross, only to separate. Other characters turn their lives upside down: Max Kunz, a philosophy professor and former Algerian soldier, Philibert Dodds, a solitary artist living in the Vercors, or Jeanne, the energetic young midwife. A war novel, a love story, a meditation on evil, on art and happiness, The Laugh of the Ogre is the story of all these lives confronted with the ambiguity and brutality of the century.