Of Illustrious Men
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Hailed as a masterpiece, Jean Rouaud’s first novel, Fields of Glory, was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and sold over a million copies worldwide. Of Illustrious Men establishes as fact what the first novel promised—that Rouaud is a writer of remarkable power, subtlety, and originality. Lovingly set in the same region as Fields of Glory, the novel is about the author’s father, Joseph, and a traveling salesman who died at forty-one and left a family in shock behind him. In the mind of the grieving eleven-year-old son—too young to have really known him—his father was a hero, a warrior, a legend of the Resistance during World War II. But the narrator is no longer that eleven-year-old boy; he is a mature and gifted writer. And though he may still ache for the loss of his father, he also knows that Joseph’s illustriousness can be found not only in the heady days of wartime glory but in moments of domestic tranquility. Of Illustrious Men evokes scenes of both war and peace with exquisite beauty and understated and poignant tenderness.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The withered, pious Aunt Marie is still in the little house in the garden. French cars are still a problematic breed. And Rouaud is still one of the most capable chroniclers of French bourgeois life. Like Annie Ernaux, Rouaud excavates the history of one family from the lower Loire valley, but he does so with infinite tenderness. While the Prix Goncourt-winning Fields of Glory portrayed the maternal grandparents he knew and the paternal family destroyed by WWI, this volume depicts the narrator's father, Joseph. A responsible, capable and loving man, Joseph criss-crossed Brittany selling porcelain and glassware six days a week. On the seventh, he often packed his family into the car and indulged in his avocation-collecting rocks, mostly large, all meant for a fountain that was never built. Years of moving heavy boxes of samples-and stones-destroyed Joseph's invertebral discs and undermined his health. Again, Rouaud delves farther into Joseph's history, one as sharply determined by WWII as the earlier generation's was by the Great War. This story is, if anything, even more poignant than its predecessor, relieved by fewer lovingly recorded absurdities. Rouaud's images are always beautiful, and even the most banal scene has the warm luminescence of an autumn afternoon. ``When Monsieur So-and-So, who progressed with metronomic regularity from one bistro to the next, came staggering up to his last port of call, everyone knew that it was two in the afternoon... and that Madame So-and-So, his wife, had been waiting stoically since the end of High Mass, her handbag on her knees in the last remaining car parked in the square.''
