Fear

Reviews

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Published in 1930, Fear was a sensation in France. The novel is told retrospectively through the voice of Dartemont, a cynical intellectual who enlists simply out of curiosity. From the shifting roles of grenadier, messenger, reconnoiterer, and hospital patient (the result of a light injury that brings him and readers barreling into the visceral horrors of war-torn soldiers), Chevallier’s protagonist is a lightly disguised version of the author himself, tracing his own experiences as a soldier…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 grows ever more distant in our memories.”

“Reads like a cross between the darkest humor and the bleakest reportage…the themes of what [Chevallier] calls ‘this antiwar book’ are timeless: the folly of nationalism, the foolish pomposity of military leaders, the arbitrariness of death, the madness of war.”

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