Word: maumort
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...There is no object so foul," Emerson says, "that intense light will not make it beautiful." This aphorism, reflecting the 19th century's core faith in progress and reason, could be the guiding premise behind Roger Martin du Gard's expansive novel, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. A memoir of the eponymous character, the novel is a testament to reflection and self-examination. Maumort, born in 1870 to an old landowning family in the Perche region of Northern France, strives to illuminate his past while his family estate serves as quarters for a Nazi regiment during the German occupation. Focusing...
...masterpiece. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for his eight-volume novel Les Thibault, the story of two brothers--one a reckless adventurer, the other a sensible physician, during World War I. Du Gard stated often that Tolstoy was his greatest creditor; Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort displays the extent of this debt, with its high moral tone and extensive, incisive depictions of both country and city society. Despite this, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort at first seems a failed project...
...novel is radically unfinished; Maumort never gets past the narrative of his childhood and young adulthood. The defining events of his life--his career as a soldier and colonialist in Morocco, his reaction to the Dreyfus affair and the death of his father--are only alluded to. Had there been time enough, du Gard's work would have been a complete study of a man's life, an exhaustive critique of human limitation and liability. However, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is a testament to care. Du Gard took extreme pains to represent the times he wrote about. Trained...