Trains of Thought: Paris to Omaha Beach, Memories of a Wartime Youth

I first heard of Victor Brombert as a lecturer on Flaubert, Tolstoy, Sartre, Woolf, Conrad and others for the Teaching Company some years ago. His depth and range were therefore first an aural experience for me, rather than one taken from a book. His easy and remarkable way with the English language (by my reckoning at least his fourth, after Russian, German and French) was an experience to be relived again and again. When I read these memoirs, I found them to be at once intimate and self-effacing, while providing a valuable historical lesson as he spun out his early years. I envy those who had the experience, either at Yale or Princeton, to be his student. I also envy someone who can use his fourth language with the musicality and depth of feeling that few can do with their first. Brombert's Trains of Thought succeeds on all levels.

Books, education, thinking, and even history itself, have been collectively buried under. There is too much undifferentiated mush, a constant rush of gabbing plenty at the beleaguered individual. From under the rubble comes Victor Brombert's valiant memoir, a classic of pinpoint remembrance, a fully humane celebration of the potency of, well, something or other. For "Trains of Thought" is profoundly self-deprecating, a miraculous occurence for a fully vested professor of the highest rank. Brombert's magisterial touch with the very act of writing brings the proper lighting to every cinematic scene. "Trains of Thought" is a gift to succeeding generations, to the remaining intelligentsia, and to states whose recent horrid past is so little understood. Scholarly work on World War II, filling ocean tankers by now, cannot approach the vivid yet conflicted remembrances of a participant/onlooker. Surely there is an element of delusion in Brombert's infatuation with the representations of high culture as they apply to immense political events, but all human affairs are conducted with such vainglorious positionings. This is a towering memoir, in a almost literal sense - humanity has the chance, through this book, to look down upon the events of those times, and see what it couldn't see before: itself. Families. Schools. Boys and girls. Social events. Mass political insanity. Fathers and mothers. Death. Survival.