Word: verdun
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...VERDUN-Jules Remains-Knopf...
...ordinary installment is Verdun (Vol. 8 in the U. S. edition, Vols. XV and XVI in the French). With it, Remains comes to World War I. This is the event for which his unhurried previous volumes, his 400-odd characters, his encyclopedic portrayal of French pre-War society, have formed the deliberate prelude. The most popular volume so far in France it will almost certainly be just as widely read in the U. S. (where it is Book-of-the-Month choice for January). One reason: the subject. Another: as narrative it is simpler, faster, more sharply focused than...
...itself Verdun will not resolve for good and all the questions about Remains' pattern and Remains' gifts. Many threads of narrative are left hanging in the past, many characters remain A. W. O. L. There are eleven volumes still to come. But all by itself Verdun makes clear Remains' distinction as a novelist, and it is considerable. It lies in the fact that he has been able to fuse the detachment of a social historian with the vision of a creative artist. From a formal standpoint Verdun proves him at least the equal of any modern writer...
Romains' countryman, Andre Malraux, achieved in Man's Fate (1934), a story of the 1927 Chinese civil war, a more vivid and at times more exalted work of dramatic craftsmanship than Verdun. But Malraux was working within far narrower limits, in what physicists by analogy might call a closed field-more exotic, more melodramatic, less austere than Romains'. John Dos Passes' ambitious trilogy of pre-War to post-War U. S. A. appears nearer to Romains' in scope, but his great powers of narrative and evocation are spent on a host of minor characters...
Probably no modern work of history or fiction ranks as such a thorough, lucid, conclusive payoff on war as Verdun. This it is, not through a mere presentation of the sickening personal truth of "combat" (Remarque) nor through scorn and excitement crystallized in art (Hemingway), but through a grownup, sympathetic intelligence. If Romains goes on so, he will have given the first grand perspective on war since War and Peace...