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Fear: A Novel Of World War I (1930)

by Gabriel Chevallier(Favorite Author)

4.4 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1590177169 (ISBN13: 9781590177167)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

NYRB Classics

review 1: Gut wrenching and powerful, this was a compelling read. Chevallier beautifully articulates the coming of age of an entire generation in the meat grinder of the Western Front. Unsparing in detail, I found myself wincing at every shellfire exchange in preparation for the aftermath of blood and guts that invariably followed. Perhaps the greatest asset of the work is its sheer repetition of inane shelling, advances and retreats. It accurately conveyed to me the banality and pointlessness of these maneuvers, and the complete waste of human life that they led to. Highly recommended.
review 2: Although Gabriel Chevallier titled the novel based on his World War I experiences "Fear", it covers a much wider palette--anger, foolhardiness, boredom, even irreverence, mostly... more directed at authority. What the reader will not find in Chevallier is any notion of glory and honor. In fact, at leave early on in the novel, his narrator, Jean Dartemont, is alienated even by the gauzy patriotism of his home town. The war itself is frequently hellish, but not without touches of wit, especially from Dartemont's friend, Negre, who imitates a nitwit general of his own invention who seems like a cross between Orwell and Heller. This is a work of controlled anger but also of intense humanity, with sharp portraits of not just Dartemont's fellow infantrymen, those who die and those who survive, including the occasional German, surrendering to the French or even working out codes of mutual warning with them. But there is no heroism here except that of having the luck to survive. The tragedy of the war is not just that the war lasted long enough to develop tank warfare, aerial bombardment, even chemical warfare, but that so much humanity was wasted to achieve so little. less

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