Word: larteguy
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...planned and given the go-ahead in the White House, and was overseen by General Creighton W. Abrams. U.S. commander in South Viet Nam. The shift in code names also underscored the extent to which Indochina's long war has changed. As French Journalist and Guerrilla Historian Jean Larteguy (The Centurions) put it last week: "First you had Asians fighting the French. Then you had Asians fighting the Americans. Now you have Asians fighting Asians." That is increasingly the case, though there are still 335,000 Americans in South Viet...
...needn't have. The 1960 bestseller (The Centurions) by Jean Larteguy described with a certain politico-military sophistication how French colonels, beaten in Indo-China, applied terrorist tactics to the struggle for Algeria. From this epic theme, Director Mark Robson has derived one of those big bad action pictures in which the explosions look frighteningly real but unfortunately don't kill off the actors fast enough...
...fairness, I should say that I doubt anybody could sell me on such a theory. But if anyone could, it certainly wouldn't be Larteguy. The problem, as I suggested above, is that The Centurions is a very bad novel. Larteguy has allowed his venomous feelings towards France and his intoxication with the military to overwhelm his book...
Perhaps in an effort to give them life, Larteguy has granted them all rich and complex lives; but the effect of this maneuver is simply to show up the author's romanticized psychology. In point of fact, The Centurions almost emerges as an argument for more and better sexuality. The identification of "real men" with strong sexuality is not silly, but it makes funny reading in what is otherwise a propagandistic tract...
Besides the soldiers and their women, The Centurions features two journalists, one hard-boiled and opportunist, the other more dreamy and appealing. It doesn't require too much imagination to realize that Larteguy (who writes for Paris-Presse) has there-by introduced himself explicitly into his novel. Evidently, he considers his own personality so complex that he must employ two characters to do justice to it. This would be offensive, except that one finishes The Centurions feeling that its author has only been playing with himself all the way along anyway...