Quotes
“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.” Wall Street Journal
“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.” New York Times Book Review
“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.” Daily Mail (London)
“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.” Sunday Telegraph (London)
“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.” Times Literary Supplement
“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.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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.” Booklist (starred review)
“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.” Kirkus Reviews
