NYRB Classics discussion

Fear



Publication Date: May 20, 2014
Pages: 336
Introduction by John Berger.
Translated from the French by Malcolm Imrie.
Originally published in 1930.

Winner of the 2013 Scott Moncrief Prize for Translation from the French

Fear is a classic of war literature, a book to place on the shelf with Storm of Steel , A Farewell to Arms , and Going After Cacciato . Jean Dartemont, the hero of Gabriel Chevallier’s autobiographical novel, enters what was not yet known as World War I in 1915, when it was just beginning to be clear that a war that all the combatants were initially confident would move swiftly to a conclusion was instead frozen murderously in place. After enduring the horrors of the trenches and the deadly leagues of no-man’s-land stretching beyond them, Jean is wounded and hospitalized. Away from the front, he confronts the relentless blindness of the authorities and much of the general public to the hideous realities of modern, mechanized combat. Jean decides he must resist. How? By telling the simple truth. Urged to encourage new recruits with tales of derring-do service, Jean does not mince words. What did he do on the battlefield? He responds like a man: “I was afraid.”

Acclaimed as “the most beautiful book ever written on the tragic events that blood-stained Europe” for five years, prosecuted on first publication as an act of sedition, Fear appears for the first time in the United States in Malcolm Imrie’s poetic and prizewinning translation on the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the conflict with which the twentieth century came into its own. Chevallier’s masterpiece remains, in the words of John Berger, “a book of the utmost urgency and relevance.”

Out today! Moving it from the forthcoming thread.

I'm about halfway through and this book needs to be on the 'essential WWI' book list. The author is merciless when describing his attitude to going to war, but it's the descriptions that get you--the stink of bloated corpses, pieces of unrecognizable flesh...