Fields of Glory

by Jean Rouaud

Overview

Winner of the Prix Goncourt
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

The setting may be the rainy lower Loire Valley of the 1950s, but it is the WW I battlefields of Artois, Meuse, Lorraine, and Yser that form the emotional backdrop to this poignant testament to the vitality of life that death cannot dim. Fields of Glory begins as a collection of utterly charming reminiscences of the eccentricities of family elders told by an unnamed and indeterminately aged narrator.

In pure and graceful prose, Rouaud describes crotchety grandfather Burgaud with his equally difficult car, a cramped and leaky CV2, and maiden great-aunt Marie with her card file of saints—"A prefatory catalogue of terrifying symptoms refers the reader to the saint specializing in the corresponding disorder. The work of a lifetime." It is in the midst of this comedy of daily life that the melancholy subtext of three generations slowly emerges: the stories of the two young men who were casualties of the Fields of Glory and the family that remains to remember them. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611457018
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	02/08/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jean Rouaud, born in Campbon, Loire-Atlantique, in 1952, earned his living as a newsstand vendor before his first success as a writer. His 1990 novel Fields of Glory won the Prix Goncourt, and he is also the author of The World, More or Less. He lives in the South of France.

Editorial Reviews

One of the most broadly appealing French novels of recent years. . . . Rouaud’s talents lie in his shrewd eye for resonant detail and a perfectly controlled voice, balancing irony and tenderness.

Washington Post

Unbearably beautiful. . . . Jean Rouaud shows mastery of the tangled personal strings by which mundane details and great events, grief and mirth, faith and despair, are connected.

Boston Globe

The ``Fields of Glory,'' reads a five-centime patriotic souvenir, ``Where the blood of France flowed in rivers from 1914 to 1916.'' The setting may be the rainy lower Loire Valley of the 1950s, but it is the WW I battlefields of Artois, Meuse, Lorraine and Yser that form the emotional backdrop to this poignant testament to the vitality of life that death cannot dim. A first effort by a then unknown newspaper vendor that went on to win the 1990 Prix Goncourt, Fields of Glory begins as a collection of utterly charming reminiscences of the eccentricities of family elders told by an unnamed and indeterminately aged narrator. In pure and graceful prose, beautifully translated by Manheim, Rouaud describes crotchety grandfather Burgaud with his equally difficult car, a cramped and leaky CV2, and maiden great-aunt Marie with her card file of saints--``A prefatory catalogue of terrifying symptoms refers the reader to the saint specializing in the corresponding disorder. The work of a lifetime.'' It is in the midst of this comedy of daily life that the melancholy subtext of three generations slowly emerges: the stories of the two young men who were casualties of the Fields of Glory and the family that remains to remember them. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This book represents a dialog between two generations seemingly far apart: three elderly veterans of the post-World War I era from the French lower Loire Valley and their grandchildren. Set in the 1950s, the novel is mainly a journey through the memories of grandfather, grandmother, and Aunt Marie, which reach as far back as battlefields near Ypres and Verdun--the ``fields of glory.'' The memories are narrated from the perspectives of the grandchildren, whose initial boredom and impatience with the nostalgic stories from another era progressively become affection and understanding for the psychological urge to remember and be remembered. Rouaud was unknown even in France until he won the Prix Goncourt 1990, France's highest fiction honor, for this novel. Recommended for all libraries.-- Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.

Library Journal