Word: maumort
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is tantalizing, but not satisfying. It leaves one with a fascination for what it could have become, with thrilling speculations...
...bare structural outlines of proposed plot, to a section entitled "The Black Box:," a compendium of aphorisms, inspirations and notes on his work. Though the disjunction between du Gard's clear and disarming prose and these scattered fragments at first is disarming, the tone never changes. Accustomed to following Maumort's (and du Gard's) scrutiny of his life, the reader only takes one step to reconstruct and assemble a life from these remnants. Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort was also a labor of love for its translators. Luc Brebion and Timothy Crouse spent seven years in consultation with Andre Daspre...
...intense regard for detail and the relentless probing of recollection in the novel has led it to sustain comparisons to Proust. Unlike Swann, the ultimate pretender, Maumort strives to be true to himself, to make his decisions lucidly and to eschew disordered thought. He laments the rare instances where his recollection reveals that his motivations were not as definite as he sensed they were. He lingers over the decisions he makes in his life, wavering, but exquisitely aware of his equivocations. Whenever possible, he takes both roads at once, for example in his choice of careers. Driven by his distant...
...With a modernist's practiced candor, Maumort discloses the most intimate details of his adolescent sexual desires, but yet there is necessarily something he holds back in his revelations. It is crucial to Maumort's project of self-revelation that he lingers on the intimate details of his sexuality; for him, private life is indissoluble from the secrets of sexual desire. And so it makes sense that during these very disclosures, we see the limitations of Maumort as a man. It seems as though he never is compelled to ask himself, do I dare? During his explorations of homosexuality...
...Maumort cut his teeth on algebra, on ideas of scientific progress, on the rules of Greek grammar. In his efforts to account for the events of his life, he spends long passages analyzing the people who were important to him, sounding their virtues and explicating their faults, with deliberately objective scrutiny. He tries to account for every failing, to explore the plausibility of every belief, and his memoirs read almost as a series of complete and independent episodes. Even when he describes the Nazi officials that use his home as a barracks for their squadron, he tries to transcend...