Love in The Days of Rage

Love in The Days of Rage
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I swore I wasn't going to buy any books. The English Graduate Association sometimes sets up a table in the lobby of the English building and sells used books to fund programs. Paperbacks cost a dollar a piece. I looked over and decided there wasn't anything I really needed enough to add it to my pile, so I sat down and read a book out of my bag. But I couldn't stop peeking at the piles out the corner of my eye. I saw Love in The Days of Rage and knew I would have to surrender. When I saw another student move toward the pile, I got up and bought it. Resigned.
Love in The Days of Rage is short enough to be called a novella. At just over 100 pages, it's a quick read, although not as quick as I thought it would be. Ferlinghetti - one of my favorite of the beat poets - writes prose in an unsurprising poetic way. There are pages that could pass as excellent poems; metaphors and similes not usually found in works of prose.
The story is about a woman - Annie - an American expatriate artist living in Paris in 1968 in the midst of the student uprising. She meets a man named Julian, a Portuguese banker with radical anarchist beliefs. The story revolves around their relationship as they grow closer against the backdrop of the revolution outside.
The biggest achievement of Love in The Days of Rage is its ability to intertwine the personal and political. Annie wonders constantly if Julian is all he claims - how could he be both an insurrectionary anarchist and a bourgeois banker? And what can't he tell her? She loves him but has a hard time justifying dating a plutocrat in the midst of a revolution.
The depictions of the students is romantic in the best way. Ferlinghetti does his job and raises question about how effective the protests are. But the demonstrators and demonstrations seem, above all, beautiful. This is Ferlinghetti's talent put to use, showing not just the anger, but the beauty of the protests. He writes about how poetry is used as both a sword and a shield.
It doesn't have as much protest-porn as I would have liked, but it still makes me wish I had been there.