La Semaine Sainte

La Semaine Sainte is an historical novel by French writer Louis Aragon published in 1958. It sold over 100,000 copies. An English translation by Haakon Chevalier was published in 1961 under the title Holy Week by Hamish Hamilton, London, to mixed reviews: "It is a very bad book, so bad that one doesn't want to write about it, and if it weren't by Aragon, France's according-to-blurb "leading poet-novelist", one wouldn't....The translation, incidentally, is execrable throughout." "Although the novel lacks the warmth of War and Peace and never makes us care very deeply for any of the characters, it displays a splendid range of intellectual understanding. The only recent book worthy to be compared with this tremendous panorama is Dr. Zhivago. M. Aragon's vision seems to me no less poetic than Pasternak's, and his technique as a novelist is far superior."