Victims of pogrom in Romania ends up in France and becomes wealthy scrap metal merchant. But when Nazis occupy he cooperates with them while also financing the Resistance and bribing officers to release prisoners. He is acclaimed at war's end but eventually convicted of corruption.

A massive and wholly engrossing epic of French criminals, collaborators, and resistance members during and after World War II. I thought at first the events of the book and its antihero Joseph Joanovici were entirely fiction, but they are based on reality, even if Nury does take a great deal of dramatic license.

Joanovici, a Romanian Jew, flees Russian pogroms and builds himself up from nothing in the scrap-metal business to a millionaire who plays both sides -- Nazi and Resistance -- in occupied France. The violence and the dark machinations clashing with personal lives reminded me a lot of The Sopranos. Like that show, I simultaneously despised the protagonist while finding myself on the edge of my seat wondering how he was going to get out of this next life-threatening moment.

Pretty damned amazing. ( )

Historien foregår i forskellige tidsperioder fra 1905 og op. Spændende historie, men lidt svært at kende forskel på de mange typer af mere eller mindre kriminelle mænd. ( )