Word: aragones
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Politically, Aragon is as devoted a party man as ever, but as a novelist, at least, he seems to have taken temporary leave from Communism's orientation classes; in Holy Week, the familiar Marxist missionizing is mercifully absent...
When the novel appeared in France two years ago, Critic Claude Mauriac, son of Novelist François Mauriac, hailed it as marking "the return of Aragon to the literary fold . . . His non-Communist colleagues-this is to say practically the whole body of French writers-have once again recognized him as one of them-even as a member of the first rank...
...Flying Eagle. The Holy Week of which Aragon writes is the chaotic, rain-drenched and rumor-filled week between Palm Sunday and Easter in 1815. Napoleon, having just escaped from Elba, was marching up to Paris to begin the historic Hundred Days, which were to end with Waterloo. And as Napoleon approached-"the Eagle flying from steeple to steeple," rallying to his standard the regiments sent against him-King Louis XVIII, fat and fatuous, was fleeing north toward the Belgian border amid a confusion of loyal musketeers and grenadiers...
...Aragon's story follows the fleeing King, and it often bogs down in its crowd of characters like one of the King's overladen carriages, choked with anxious courtiers. Not even Aragon's hero, a musketeer who dotes on his horse and his fancy uniform, matters much. The scenes are the thing-scenes of moiling confusion and moral disintegration, observed with the sharp eye and tongue of a poet who was a soldier at Dunkirk and returned from England to fight until he was captured on the day before the fall of France...
...wars, split by divided loyalties and false dreams-and find consolation for today's troubles in the knowledge that within two generations, France was to rise again to lead the Continent. In one of the disconcerting asides to the reader with which he interrupts his narrative, Aragon writes: "Perhaps this book falsely, only apparently, turned toward the past, is only a great quest of the future on my part; perhaps it is only that last view of the world in which I merely need to burst my everyday clothes, the clothes of all my days. And perhaps that...