Fear
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It is 1915. Jean Dartemont is just a young man. He is not a rebel, but neither is he awed by authority and when he's called up and given only the most rudimentary training, he refuses to follow his platoon. Instead, he is sent to Artois, where he experiences the relentless death and violence of the trenches. His reprieve finally comes when he is wounded, evacuated and hospitalised.
The nurses consider it their duty to stimulate the soldiers' fighting spirit, and so ask Jean what he did at the front.
His reply?
'I was afraid.'
First published in France in 1930, Fear is both graphic and clear-eyed in its depiction of the terrible experiences of soldiers during the First World War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chevallier's (best known for Clochemerle) book, published for the first time in the U.S. with an award-winning translation by Malcolm Imrie on the centennial of World War I, represents that rarest of war narratives one that is indispensable, nearly unprecedented, and painfully relevant. Based on Chevalier's experiences on WWI's front lines, the novel was met with controversy upon its original publication in France in 1930. The plot unfurls in linear war-story fashion: our "malcontent hero," Dartemont, is unceremoniously dispatched to the trenches, "where rotting corpses serve as bait." He's subsequently wounded, and convalesces in a hospital among insane youths and acquiescent matrons, only to return home a changed man. There he is treated with baffled embarrassment by his family, and shipped back to the sustained nightmare of the front lines. What makes Chevallier's book a masterpiece is the lucidity of the author's eyewitness account; its prose moves from practical concerns like picking lice to poetic reverie in the space of a paragraph, capturing the chaos of war and the stillness of the battlefield, revealing a terrible beauty.
