Status
Available
Publication
Albin Michel (2013), Edition: 1, 576 pages
Description
The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines. When another of D'Aulnay-Pradelle's soldiers, Albert Maillard, reaches the bodies and discovers how they died, the lieutenant shoves him into a shell hole to silence him. Albert is rescued by fellow soldier, the artist Edouard Péricourt, who takes a bullet in the face. The war ends and both men recover, but Edouard is permanently disfigured, and fakes his death to prevent his family from seeing him as a cripple. In gratitude for Edouard's rescue, Albert becomes the injured man's companion and caregiver. Finding that the postwar gratitude for the soldiers' service is nothing more than lip-service to an empty idea, the two men scramble to survive, ultimately devising a scam to take money for never-to-be-built war memorials from small towns. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pradelle has married Edouard's sister Madeline and is running a scam of his own that involves the exhumation of war victims. In this sorrowful, heart-searching novel, the interwoven lives of these three men create a tapestry of the human condition as seen through the lens of war, revealing brutality and compassion, heroism and cowardice, in equal measure.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Widsith
A very strange book to have won the Goncourt Prize – it's more superficially engaging than you might expect from French literary fiction (the author is better known as a writer of thrillers), but also much more shallow. In fact it doesn't really seem to be about anything, except for a string of
We do get off to quite an exciting start: a battlefield in the closing days of the war, November 1918, and two French privates whose lives come together in a moment of near-death melodrama. The soldiers' subsequent attempts to make a go of it in post-war Paris are inwoven with the country's capitalist rush to finance war memorials: while the concept of the French solider is fêted and glorified, actual surviving soldiers, many of whom are grotesquely injured, are ostracised and shunned.
La guerre avait été une terrible épreuve de solitude, mais ce n'était rien comparé à cette période de démobilisation qui prenait des allures de descente aux enfers….
Thematically this should be pretty interesting, but unfortunately it's mostly used as the pretext for a lot of dramatic set-pieces whose narrative tension is sometimes engineered rather cheaply. I think it's cheating, for instance, to say that a character has died, only to reveal later that he's still alive after all, and similar tricks are played at several points herein. The main characters become involved in perpetrating a huge countrywide scam, and this is squeezed for every drop of manufactured tension it can provide. Which personally, I hated – you know those scenes in films or TV shows where someone's snuck into someone's office, and they have to get a file out of a drawer, or download something on to a USB stick or something?—and at the same time you can see the owner pulling up outside and walking up the stairs, turning the handle – argh! I can't stand these scenes, I actually sometimes have to switch over because they stress me out so much. Well this book is kind of like that, only strung out for five hundred pages.
(That title, by the way. It means ‘See you in heaven’ or something along those lines, but for Anglophone readers – well, for me anyway – it can't help bringing to mind echoes of Robert Graves's famous First World War memoir, Goodbye to All That. The English translation of this one appears to be called The Great Swindle, which is…fine, if kind of giving up.)
The writing style is not bad – it's very easy to read, few long words, a feeling of wit and intelligence there, but certainly nothing that makes you want to underline phrases in delight; and while the two main characters are well done, the same can't be said for some of the supporting cast: the perky-parlourmaid love interest and the evil-aristo baddie seem to have been ordered straight from central casting. Because of its length and its episodic nature, some people have compared this to the big nineteenth-century novels, but that's a strange connection to want to make with a story like this, which takes its narrative inspiration much more from Barbusse, Genevoix and Chevallier (as the afterword explicitly says). Problem is I'm not sure Pierre Lemaitre really comes out of this comparison well, which is a polite way of saying that he definitely doesn't – many parts of his book are good fun, but you'd do a lot better to read Barbusse, Genevoix and Chevallier instead.
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vaguely related incidents involving two survivors of the First World War – and at more than six hundred pages, that's really not enough. This book is just far too long. In fact by the time you finally reach the end, you've already long since metaphorically put the chairs on the tables and started switching lights off.We do get off to quite an exciting start: a battlefield in the closing days of the war, November 1918, and two French privates whose lives come together in a moment of near-death melodrama. The soldiers' subsequent attempts to make a go of it in post-war Paris are inwoven with the country's capitalist rush to finance war memorials: while the concept of the French solider is fêted and glorified, actual surviving soldiers, many of whom are grotesquely injured, are ostracised and shunned.
La guerre avait été une terrible épreuve de solitude, mais ce n'était rien comparé à cette période de démobilisation qui prenait des allures de descente aux enfers….
Thematically this should be pretty interesting, but unfortunately it's mostly used as the pretext for a lot of dramatic set-pieces whose narrative tension is sometimes engineered rather cheaply. I think it's cheating, for instance, to say that a character has died, only to reveal later that he's still alive after all, and similar tricks are played at several points herein. The main characters become involved in perpetrating a huge countrywide scam, and this is squeezed for every drop of manufactured tension it can provide. Which personally, I hated – you know those scenes in films or TV shows where someone's snuck into someone's office, and they have to get a file out of a drawer, or download something on to a USB stick or something?—and at the same time you can see the owner pulling up outside and walking up the stairs, turning the handle – argh! I can't stand these scenes, I actually sometimes have to switch over because they stress me out so much. Well this book is kind of like that, only strung out for five hundred pages.
(That title, by the way. It means ‘See you in heaven’ or something along those lines, but for Anglophone readers – well, for me anyway – it can't help bringing to mind echoes of Robert Graves's famous First World War memoir, Goodbye to All That. The English translation of this one appears to be called The Great Swindle, which is…fine, if kind of giving up.)
The writing style is not bad – it's very easy to read, few long words, a feeling of wit and intelligence there, but certainly nothing that makes you want to underline phrases in delight; and while the two main characters are well done, the same can't be said for some of the supporting cast: the perky-parlourmaid love interest and the evil-aristo baddie seem to have been ordered straight from central casting. Because of its length and its episodic nature, some people have compared this to the big nineteenth-century novels, but that's a strange connection to want to make with a story like this, which takes its narrative inspiration much more from Barbusse, Genevoix and Chevallier (as the afterword explicitly says). Problem is I'm not sure Pierre Lemaitre really comes out of this comparison well, which is a polite way of saying that he definitely doesn't – many parts of his book are good fun, but you'd do a lot better to read Barbusse, Genevoix and Chevallier instead.
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LibraryThing member danhammang
I can't help but shake my head with a wry grin as I consider that this book, out of all the fiction I have read, is the first to have footnotes and that the author is French. The style owes much to Victor Hugo. The climax is only partially satisfying. I'm not sure it was worth plodding through over
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400 pages. Still it is good to view WWI and its' aftermath through the eyes of a Frenchman. One looks back a century and it is difficult to imagine how difficult those times were. LeMaitre loves his Paris and his France. And who could blame him. Show Less
LibraryThing member PhilipJHunt
This one is rather unlike the Camille trilogy (which is more violent and thrilling). Derived from a true event in post-WW1 France, LeMaitre has invented a grand scheme or two and a bunch of sad, dark and miserable characters to go with them. The plot is straight-forward and linear, again unlike the
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Camille books. Will they get away with it? Read on. Some might like this. Also, rather more often than I could invariably pick, the novel pays homage to a raft of other novelists. LeMaitre is, at heart, a literature teacher. The general mood is dark, and most of the main characters are pretty unlovable. Some of them get their just deserts, while others generate enough warmth that I was glad they ended up, more or less, happily. LeMaitre is good at character, and a good portion of the novel involves unwrapping the characters moods, feelings, ideas, worries and motivations. He does this well. Show Less
LibraryThing member AHS-Wolfy
With the great war coming to an end and the chances for further quick advancement in rank dwindling, Lieutenant Henri d'Aulnay-Pradelle arranges for one last offensive to take a strategically important position. To accomplish this though requires nefarious means and when two soldiers stumble across
Very different to what I've read from the author previously, those being brutal crime thrillers, this is more a literary post-war historical fiction that looks at what life means in the aftermath of conflict. It does take some time to set things in motion with scene setting and characterisation prominent early on but once the story is firmly back in Paris then it really takes off. While bleak in nature the tale is still dotted with plenty of humorous moments and situations and does keep the reader wondering who is going to get away with what so far as the swindles of the title are concerned.
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the remains of Pradelle's doings then he may have to orchestrate something further. When one of the two gets buried alive and the other is badly wounded trying to come to his rescue perhaps he'll get away with it after all. When the war finally comes to an end the three men's paths will cross again but who'll come out on top this time?Very different to what I've read from the author previously, those being brutal crime thrillers, this is more a literary post-war historical fiction that looks at what life means in the aftermath of conflict. It does take some time to set things in motion with scene setting and characterisation prominent early on but once the story is firmly back in Paris then it really takes off. While bleak in nature the tale is still dotted with plenty of humorous moments and situations and does keep the reader wondering who is going to get away with what so far as the swindles of the title are concerned.
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LibraryThing member bowlees
Winner of the Prix Goncourt. Novel of men at war, sacrifice, comradeship and revenge.
Awards
Crime Writers' Association Awards (Winner — 2016)
Europese Literatuurprijs (Longlist — 2015)
French-American Foundation Translation Prize (Shortlist — 2016)
Prix Goncourt (1. Auswahl — 2013)
Language
Original publication date
2013
Physical description
576 p.; 8.07 inches
ISBN
2226249672 / 9782226249678