[Burnson provides a plot summary and favorable review of Love in the Days of Rage.]

When the streets of Paris erupted with student demonstrations twenty years ago, San Francisco poet / publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti began jotting down notes in his expatriate's journal which recorded the events as a painter might view them—impressionistically. It comes as small surprise, then, to observe that his novella should move at the same painterly, unmannered pace. Love in the Days of Rage challenges the reader on several stylistic levels as it attempts to mirror the anarchistic uprising of '68 which briefly united intellectuals, artists, and proletariats in common cause. It's an uneven ride, at times maddeningly confused, but noble in intent and final effect.

Our lovers are mature, yet unconventional. Annie is the forty-year-old daughter of New York "old lefties" who has abandoned political commitment in the Lower East Side to teach and study art abroad. Julian Mendes, the fifty-five-year-old Parisian bank executive she meets in the Café Malbillon, seems to her initially as the very model of bourgeois respectability. The physical attraction proves irresistible, though, and once they become better acquainted, Annie discovers that her suitor is a man of rare political passion who plans to act—and act decisively—upon his beliefs in the wake of spring's rebellion.

As a young man living in Portugal, Julian developed his anarchist principles in response to the repressive regime of Antonio Salazar, whose secret police "disappeared" countless numbers of free-thinking opponents: "Every cliché about dictatorships was truer for Portugal than anywhere else," Julian contends. "But no matter how absolute power is, there's always some corner holding out, silently, secretly, refusing to conform…."

The rhetoric falls upon deaf ears, however. For Annie, painting is a vocation unfettered by political concern; only when her sinecure as a Sorbonne instructor is threatened does she awaken to the urgency of student revolt and the anthem "Imagination au Pouvoir!" Her radicalism is fueled by the brutality of club-wielding gendarmerie defending the barricades. By the time Julian reveals himself to be of even more subversive bent than first perceived, she prepares for an adventure predicated on pure devotion to the man and the cause he champions.

It is here that this slender work of fiction begins to depart from conventional narrative form and takes on the more lyrical prose of the author's first novel, Her. Ferlinghetti, the painter, takes charge at this point, covering his canvas with imagery freighted with inchoate suspense and misty intrigue. Once embarked on the revolutionary path, the lovers are destined to remain "fugitives in an absurd fugitive dream."

In France a bavure is a hitch, a foul-up, notably by officials or police so common that a smooth operation is referred to as "sans bavure." Without disclosing the climax to this inventive plot, let us assuredly state that what Ferlinghetti has achieved is remarkably hitchless and honest.