Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort

Timothy Crouse has always had an eye for the telling story that's right under everyone's nose, but which most everyone else misses. His book "The Boys on the Bus" was the first not only to notice the enormous power of the press in a presidential campaign but also candidly to describe its operations. His journalism over the years has been marked by a stubborn willingness to describe contradictions and unfairness, bringing a clear Orwellian eye to an examination of the social and political conventions by which we live and would just as soon forget. Yet he has always been among the most entertaining and fluent of writers, successfully tackling many genres.His update of the libretto to Cole Porter's musical "Anything Goes" matched that 1920s show with the madcap spirit of the `80s, and ran for years in New York.When, lately, the word trickled out that for his latest project Crouse was engaged in translating a massive, 60 year old French novel, by an obscure (to Americans) Nobel Prize winner that dealt in detail with French life in the 19th century, readers wondered what was with this chronicler of our own times and spirit.Trust Crouse, however, to find the contemporary in what everyone else thought of as antique. The book, "Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort" (Knopf), written by Roger Martin Du Gard, is now out in a fluent, companionable translation done jointly by Crouse, and his collaborator, Luc Brebion Ph.D. Brebion himself is a distinguished, Berkeley-based, writer, translator and lecturer on aestheticsAs an example of the translators' art, Brebion and Crouse have produced a model. The text flows easily and persuasively; the notes are few and unobtrusive; the narrative voice is candid and companionable. In age when most writers are writing books designed to be read in 10 minute spurts, Brebion and Crouse offer a text that inveigles the reader into a richer, more rewarding reading experience. The ten minutes you have before bed for reading, quickly becomes with "Maumort" thirty, thirty minutes become forty-five.Ostensibly the memoir, written as the Nazis invade France in 1940, by a retired French officer of his life in the previous 80 years, "Maumort" is a surprisingly frank and insightful account of social, family, political, intellectual, and sexual manners.It may indeed have been too frank - the author, Martin du Gard, who died in 1958 before he could finish the work, had, at any rate, ordered its publication to be posthumous.One of the most modern portraits is of a single woman, who adopts a child, only to be disappointed when the adopted child fails to prove to be brilliant. The consequences are horrible as the mother withdraws from the adopted daughter. As Martin duGard writes, "In fact, she was not satisfied with loving the girl, she wanted to be proud of her as well, wanted her affection to be, as it were, justified by the child's exceptional qualities." This novella, "The Story of Henriette," sounds an

This book, brilliantly translated, is a treasure of treasures. Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities," from an ironic, intellectual and dispassionate viewpoint, called into question a broad range of our unconscious conventional assumptions about society and reality. "Remembrance of Things Past" brought personal experience under the lens of Marcel Proust's delicate and evocative aesthetic microscope--again, from the point of view of a detached observer. Roger Martin du Gard, using Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort as his vehicle, is the ultimate participant in life and his examinations and judgments of his actions are honest and unsparing. Reading "Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort", narrated with elegance and sobriety, was for me a cataclysmic, relentless and successful assault on many of the complacent assumptions about my "sense of self". The fortitude required of the reader to remain open to Maumort's(du Gard's) courageous exploration of the totality of his own life is repaid many times over. This is not a novel in any conventional sense. It is an experience.

An incredible book. The final section, called "The Black Box", could have been published in its own right. It is chock full of short essays about the most fascinting topics, amazingly relevant to our times.

This has just become one of my top ten books of all time. I've always loved the Thibaults saga by the same author, Roger Martin du Gard, but with this one, his last effort, he actually outdid himself. Terrific stories, one after the other. Characters so lifelike and complex that you can't believe they are fictional creations. And an absolute jewel right in the middle - a novel-within-the-novel called "The Drowning": one of the most gripping tales I've ever read anywhere, crafted by a past master of human psychology. This section alone is more than worth the price of admission!

A great book. This engrossing fictional memoir spans the time from the idyll of rural France in the late nineteenth century to the brilliant salons of fin-de-siecle Paris to the horrors of two world wars, probably the greatest period of change in the history of mankind. The witness to this epoch and to his own internal and external development is the narrator, Lt.-Col. de Maumort. He has the best opportunities and teachers his era can offer, and he strives to evolve and to follow his conscience in a world in which conscience matters little. (The exploration of the step-by-step justification of fascism provided to Maumort by occupying Nazi officers, also men of education and cultivation, is a novel in itself, and unlike any other representation of the subject of how seemingly decent people rationalize evil). The story has a wonderful momentum. Unlike most memoirs, fictional and otherwise, which tend always to be self-serving, this one returns again and again to the truth, baring all of the failures, self-betrayals, and contradictions of a life. No wonder Martin du Gard didn't want this to appear in his lifetime. Though the book on the surface appears to be the recollections of a military man walled up in his library while German soldiers occupy his estate in northern France, in fact it's a universal testament about what it is to be human--the best of contemporary fiction, in which every moment comes alive. The translation is superb--far more accurate, literary, and sensitive than the sometimes muddled one of the new Modern Library edition of "The Charterhouse of Parma." This is a book to treasure and reread. The "Black Box" section at the end is an extraodinary bonus: the author, a man apparently very like Maumort, in dialogue with himself through a series of memorable apercus.