Gabriel Chevallier (1895–1969) was the son of a notary clerk
and lived in Lyon for most of his life. He was called up at the
start of World War I and wounded a year later. Returning to the
front, he spent the remainder of the war as an infantryman, and was
ultimately awarded the Croix de Guerre and named Chevalier de la
Légion d’Honneur. He began writing Fear in 1925 but did not publish
it until 1930, a year after his first novel, Durand: voyageur de
commerce, was released. Fear was suppressed during World War II and
not made available again until 1951, by which time Chevallier had
earned international fame for his Clochemerle (1934), a comedy of
provincial French manners of the Beaujolais region that sold
several million copies. In all Chevallier would write twenty-one
novels, including several more set in the fictional village of
Clochemerle.
John Berger is the author of numerous works of fiction and
nonfiction, including To the Wedding, the Into Their Labours
trilogy, About Looking, Ways of Seeing, and G., for which he won
the Booker Prize. His most recent book is Understanding a
Photograph, a collection of his writings about photography, edited
by Geoff Dyer. He lives in a small rural community in France.
Malcolm Imrie’s translations from the French include Guy
Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle and José Pierre’s
Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1928–1932. His
translation of Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear won the Scott Moncrieff
Prize, the most prestigious award for a French-to-English
translation.
“Fear hardly feels like an object from the lost-and-found, which is
why it has preserved its capacity to gobsmack. Chevallier’s
protagonist, Jean Dartemont, a sardonic 19-year-old student from
Paris shoved into a uniform and rushed to the trenches, narrates
the war with a bracingly modern sensibility. He is confessional,
self-deprecatory, and a little bit vulgar. There’s a strong streak
of Joseph Heller in his Erich Maria Remarque.”
—Franklin Foer, The New Republic
“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.”
—Thomas Keneally, The New York Times Book Review
“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
“A chronological burst of battle stories and vindictive reflections
on the paradox of war, Fear is structurally similar to Ernst
Jünger's Storm of Steel, while readers of Céline (a contemporary of
Chevallier's) will catch whiffs of the sardonic misanthropy that
runs through Journey to the End of Night. 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 grws ever more distant in
our memories.”
—Booklist
“Its first-person narration by a young soldier who, like the
author, was wounded in battle, hospitalized, returned to the front
and remained an infantryman until the armistice reads like a cross
between the darkest humor and the bleakest reportage . . . the
themes of what [Chevallier] calls “this anti-war book” are
timeless: the folly of nationalism, the foolish pomposity of
military leaders, the arbitrariness of death, the madness of
war.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“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.”
—Neil Fitzgerald, TLS
“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.”
—Tobias Grey, The Wall Street Journal
“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.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“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.”
—The Daily Mail
“The most beautiful book ever written on the tragic events that
blood-stained Europe for nearly five years.”
—Le Libertaire
“Gabriel Chevallier’s unsentimental 1930 novel . .
. stands in angry denunciation of any presumed heroism in
himself or his fellows...This is what has become of jaunty young
fools who marched off to war dreaming of adventure and conquest, of
tasting exotic foods and women. Faced with the enormity of this
cruel joke, laughter and tears merge in one prolonged cri de coeur
as Chevallier’s relentless narrative charges headlong through
hell.”
—David Wright, Seattle Times
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