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|title=The Tyrant

|sort=Tyrant

|publisher=Bitter Lemons Press

|date=April 2012

|summary=There is no question that this is a significant novel, the first non-French publication to win the Prix Goncourt, and this new English translation makes it available to a wider readership. It is not so obvious however that this serious, literary novel from the 1970s still has a resonance the world of the 2010s – it feels much more like an object for historical study than one which speaks to the post-millennium generation.

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Jean Calmet, teacher of Latin in a lycee of the 1960s in Switzerland, is confronting his father's death. He can hardly be said to be coming to terms with it, for Calmet pere was and remains a crushing force in Jean's life, and although the death would in many similar novels be a release, here his father's cremation serves to batter Jean into a beaten state. His relations with his work, his lover, his students are all suffused with not a sense of loss but a sense of continuing and growing dominance by the ghost of his father. The authoritian presence seems to grow as a spectre rather than diminish through his death.