The Missing of the Somme
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun,
looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future,
of the future's view of the past.
Geoff Dyer's classic book is an original and personal meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This instant classic first published in 1994 and now available in the U.S. by acclaimed British author Dyer (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition) presents an extended "meditation" on the Great War's contemporary and historical meanings. Dyer was one of the first to interpret war in the context of the quest for "memory and meaning" made familiar by Jay Winter and David Gregory. For the British, "the war helped to preserve the past even as it destroyed it," and provided a caesura between a stable past and an uncertain future. Dyer supports his point with an impressive survey of poems, letters, memoirs, and novels, combined with a perceptive analysis of British war memorials, and utilizing extensive citations. He concludes with an elegiac description of a peaceful, isolated Somme battlefield: "where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace." Ironically, Dyer's contribution to making the Great War part of the Matter of Britain also helped transform the Somme into a center of tourism and pilgrimage, vulgar but vital.
