★ 03/24/2014
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. (May)
Fear hardly feels like an object from the lost-and-found, which is why it has preserved its capacity to gobsmack. Chevallier’s protagonist, Jean Dartemont, a sardonic 19-year-old student from Paris shoved into a uniform and rushed to the trenches, narrates the war with a bracingly modern sensibility. He is confessional, self-deprecatory, and a little bit vulgar. There’s a strong streak of Joseph Heller in his Erich Maria Remarque.”
—Franklin Foer, The New Republic
“All the phases of this particularly horrid war, phases that we have become accustomed to from later writing, are recounted here in a remarkable voice . . . And, in this prizewinning translation by Malcolm Imrie, his writing still has a ferocious power…Chevallier’s narrative remains radioactive with pure terror, frightening in a way later accounts don’t quite manage. It’s hard to believe, given the powerful, almost American casualness of his voice, that this is its first American appearance. His tone is so inveigling and so amiable as he inducts us like witnesses into that great European madness with which the past century began, decades before most who will read this translation were born. It’s also hard to believe, once we’re deeply engaged with the book, that Chevallier is dealing with events that are nearly a hundred years in the past, deploying prose that’s almost as old. We are lucky his voice came through.”
—Thomas Keneally, The New York Times Book Review
“Chevallier’s book . . . represents that rarest of war narratives—one that is indispensable, nearly unprecedented, and painfully relevant . . . 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.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
“A chronological burst of battle stories and vindictive reflections on the paradox of war, Fear is structurally similar to Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel, while readers of Céline (a contemporary of Chevallier's) will catch whiffs of the sardonic misanthropy that runs through Journey to the End of Night. Dartemont deconstructs the notions of duty and heroism and draws their origins in fear and ignorance while letting us rifle through his blood-stained sketchbook with images from a war that grws ever more distant in our memories.”
—Booklist
“Its first-person narration by a young soldier who, like the author, was wounded in battle, hospitalized, returned to the front and remained an infantryman until the armistice reads like a cross between the darkest humor and the bleakest reportage . . . the themes of what [Chevallier] calls “this anti-war book” are timeless: the folly of nationalism, the foolish pomposity of military leaders, the arbitrariness of death, the madness of war.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Reading Fear feels like being led through the damnation panel of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the front line ‘blazing like some infernal factory where monstrous crucibles melted human flesh into a bloody lava.’ Fear remains a bravura work, fearless from start to finish, pitiless in its targets, passionate in its empathy.”
—Neil Fitzgerald, TLS
“Gabriel Chevallier’s autobiographical novel about serving in the bombed-out trenches of World War I still chills the blood. In indelible passages it describes the sensory degradation of war on the human body. Translated into English by Malcolm Imrie without a hint of stiltedness, Chevallier’s long-neglected novel is one of the most effective indictments of war ever written.”
—Tobias Grey, The Wall Street Journal
“If Fear has an English equivalent it is The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning or, in German, Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, each of which give a view of the war from the perspective of lowly infantrymen, and both of whom, like Chevallier, remain stoutly immune to the old lie that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“Gabriel Chevallier, best known for his magnificent novel Clochemerle, has used his experiences during World War I to produce a work of great intensity, comparable to such great literary masterpieces of the period as Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire.”
—The Daily Mail
“The most beautiful book ever written on the tragic events that blood-stained Europe for nearly five years.”
—Le Libertaire
“Gabriel Chevallier’s unsentimental 1930 novel . . . stands in angry denunciation of any presumed heroism in himself or his fellows...This is what has become of jaunty young fools who marched off to war dreaming of adventure and conquest, of tasting exotic foods and women. Faced with the enormity of this cruel joke, laughter and tears merge in one prolonged cri de coeur as Chevallier’s relentless narrative charges headlong through hell.”
—David Wright, Seattle Times
2014-04-16
A French novel originally published in 1930 suggests that war is hell, in any century, in any country.The first American publication of this novel—by a French author known mainly as a satirist (Clochemerle, 1934)—marks the centennial of World War I. Its first-person narration by a young soldier who, like the author, was wounded in battle, hospitalized, returned to the front and remained an infantryman until the armistice reads like a cross between the darkest humor and the bleakest reportage. At the start, he seems clueless: "I was, in particular, very bad at marching." By the end, he has become hopeless: "I have fallen to the bottom of the abyss of my self, to the bottom of those dungeons where the soul's greatest secrets lie hidden, and it is a vile cesspit, a place of viscous darkness....I am ashamed of the sick animal wallowing in filth that I have become." In between, he witnesses an onslaught of carnage and death, matter-of-factly and often graphically, while caring little about whether he lives and almost welcoming death as an escape. His wound provides temporary respite: "A hospital is the promised land, the greatest hope for millions of men. And for all the pain and suffering and harrowing sights it can contain, it is still the greatest happiness that a soldier can imagine....After I've paid my debt of pain every morning (the cost of my board and lodging), I really do feel as if I'm on holiday." Chevallier (who died in 1969) said in the preface to a 1951 edition that he would have written the story differently later. But the themes of what he calls "this anti-war book" are timeless: the folly of nationalism, the foolish pomposity of military leaders, the arbitrariness of death, the madness of war.In tone, much of this novel feels very modern.
