{"id":7284,"date":"2007-11-27T07:26:57","date_gmt":"2007-11-27T12:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7284"},"modified":"2015-05-09T07:35:35","modified_gmt":"2015-05-09T11:35:35","slug":"the-books-a-very-long-engagement-sebastien-japrisot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7284","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cA Very Long Engagement\u201d (Sebastien Japrisot)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:<\/p>\n

\"VeryLongEngagement.jpg\"Excerpt from A Very Long Engagement: A Novel<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Sebastien Japrisot<\/p>\n

Ted<\/a> gave me this wonderful, haunting (and, in a weird way, fun) book as a gift years ago. I highly recommend it – to anyone who is looking for a good book. I still remember my pleasure of first reading it. It’s a war novel – it takes place during WWI, in France – but it’s also a love story. A young girl – Mathilde – waits for her lover (Jean – whose many nicknames include Manech and Cornflower) to come home to her. Is he dead? Alive? There is something mysterious at work. He was court-martialed for injuring himself on purpose. But then what? Where did he go? Mathilde, only a teenager, can’t get any straight answers. She’s a great character, by the way. Wonderful. Physically handicapped (she can’t walk), open-hearted, courageous, determined. The book is mostly her story. Her lover never returned from the war (like millions of others who never returned). But there is no death notice, nothing official … it seems that something else must have happened, something shameful, something that is being hidden. The book opens with 5 soldiers being walked through the mud to an uncertain fate. They are shackled. They tell each other to look out for trip wires. These 5 soldiers (we get to know them very well) all never return … and Mathilde begins to piece together what happened to them. This is a jigsaw puzzle of a book – with clues dropped, and letters written in code – fragments of notes – mysterious messages … Mathilde begins to seek out the loved ones (anyone!!) of the other 4 soldiers – to see if they know anything of the fates of their men. Did they say anything? Her search takes her far and wide. She is so young, but – like the title of the book says – she is willing to wait. This boy was her lover, her intended, he was everything to her. If she cannot have him in person, then she will put together how he died. It will not be easy, but she cannot just say to herself, “Oh well, that’s it – I’ll never know if he’s alive or dead …” That would be so wrong. A betrayal of the highest order.<\/p>\n

What happened to those 5 French men, buried in mud on the front line? Shackled each to the other? Why does the trail go so cold at a certain point? What happened? And why will no one speak of it?<\/p>\n

That’s the trajectory of the book. Because I read it in translation from the French, I can only say that the translation is wonderful. I’m sure it would be best in the original language – but to my ears, this translation flows, it has a poetry to it, a wit, an intelligence – it doesn’t feel stilted at all like some translations. The book is about the horror of war, certainly – the chaos of it, the gore, man’s inhumanity to man. But it’s also about a very smart very determined young lady, putting together as much information as she can – re-reading all of her lover’s letters to her (we read the letters – the book is full of fragments of text like that) – trying to figure out if he knew anything more than he was telling. We get to know each of the soldiers – their lives, their significant others – they’re all so different, although they are all French – but the only connecting link between them is that they all disappeared off the face of the earth one muddy night – and nobody knows where they are. Mathilde takes it as her mission to put together the story. It takes a long time. We only get glimpses – out-of-sequence glimpses – we are involved in her “detective work” – she breaks the code of one of the soldier’s letters – and is able to read the hidden message within the text … It’s all great great stuff.<\/p>\n

Very moving, too. What we do for love. And how soldiers depend on that love still being there when they return home. It is everything.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it!! Mathilde is a heroine for the ages, she really is. I still think about her sometimes, and wonder what became of her, and how she fared in the rest of her life. She made that much of an impression on me.<\/p>\n


\nExcerpt from A Very Long Engagement: A Novel<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Sebastien Japrisot<\/b><\/p>\n

When suffering becomes simply too great to bear, it sometimes precedes its victims to the grave. After the staggering blow of his conviction, something inside Cornflower had quietly broken, like a monstrous abscess, as he lay in the darkness of the cattle truck bearing him and fourteen others to their unknown destination. From that moment on he was unconscious, save for brief spells of bewilderment, of what he had just lived through, the war, his missing hand, the silence of the mudmen lined up as he passed by and who averted their gaze from his, for the look in his eyes was docile, trusting, unbearable, and his fixed smile was the grimace of a demented child.<\/p>\n

He walked along smiling so strangely, the last of these five soldiers who had to be punished; he had blue eyes and black hair, his cheeks were dirty but almost beardless, and now at last his youth gave him an advantage, for he had an easier time of it than his companions in the flooded trenches. In face, he had an animal sense of well-being at plowing through the mud, with the cold wind in his face, listening to the shouts and laughter of evenings gone by: he was coming home from school, along the path through the dunes, between the ocean and the lake, and it was that curious winter when there was snow everywhere, he knew his dog Kiki was coming to meet him in the gleaming sunset, he was hungry, he longed for some bread and honey and a big cup of hot chocolate.<\/p>\n

Someone, somewhere, said to watch out for the wire.<\/p>\n

Mathilde doesn’t know if Manech heard this, through all the commotion of his childhood memories, through the crash of the great waves that broke over them as she clung to him at the age of twelve, fifteen … She was sixteen when they first made love, one April afternoon, and swore to marry as soon as he came back from the war. She was seventeen when they told her he was lost. She cried a great deal, because women take such things hard, but she did not overdo it, because women don’t give up easily, either.<\/p>\n

There was still that wire, mended whenever it broke with whatever came to hand, a wire that snaked its way through all the trenches, through all the winters, now up at the top, now down at the bottom, across all the lines, until it reached the obscure bunker of an obscure captain to deliver criminal orders. Mathilde had seized hold of it. She holds it still. It guides her into the labyrinth from which Manech has not returned. When it breaks, she ties the frayed ends together. She never loses heart. The more time passes, the greater her confidence grows, and her determination as well.<\/p>\n

And Mathilde has a cheerful disposition, too. She tells herself that if this wire doesn’t lead her back to her lover, that’s all right, she can always use it to hang herself.<\/p>\n