14 (1914) (French Edition) - Softcover

Jean Echenoz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 2707322571 ISBN 13: 9782707322579

Publisher: Editions Du Seuil, 2012

Synopsis

Sur la scène de la rentrée littéraire, le magicien Echenoz opère à nouveau. En un tour de main il fait d'un petit livre, au format de nouvelle, un grand livre sur la grande guerre, celle de 14, dont le seul chiffre suffit au titre. Au creux de ce court récit, descriptif comme le journal d'un mobilisé, attentif aux moindres détails d'interminables préparatifs plutôt révélateurs de l'impréparation -, surgit l'horreur des tranchées, des offensives et des exécutions. C'est la fin d'un monde et, peut-être, dans la douleur et la désillusion, le timide espoir d'un monde nouveau.
Au lecteur de se précipiter sur le dernier Echenoz, pour lire et faire lire ce texte, qui devrait figurer au programme d'histoire des lycées. A défaut d'avoir le temps de lire tous les écrivains de la Grande Guerre, les jeunes auront une idée du drame qui, précisément à leur âge, a frappé la génération de leurs arrière grands parents.
Echenoz parsème son récit de références discrètes ou cocasses : la bicyclette du curé, la cervelière, le sac trop lourd pour une sinistre randonnée, le casque trop brillant et le pantalon trop voyant pour le guetteur ennemi. Le futile côtoie l'horreur et le tragique, du même ton, qui fut peut être celui d'Anthime, ou de ses camarades, héros involontaires du suicide des nations, devenus inscriptions dans le marbre des monuments des places de village ou cobayes de la médecine réparatrice. Certains sont revenus pourtant, le plus souvent taisants. Alors que le dernier des poilus survivants vient de disparaître, Jean Echenoz semble lui avoir redonné la parole.

About this title

About the Author:

Jean Echenoz est né à Orange en 1947. Il a obtenu le prix Médicis en 1983 pour Cherokee et le prix Goncourt en 1999 pour Je m’en vais. 14 est son quinzième roman publié aux Éditions de Minuit.

Review:

The story could hardly be simpler. Five young Frenchmen leave their village to fight in the Great War. Some will be grievously injured, some won t return.

But in the hands of France s literary magician Jean Echenoz, this exceedingly short, bare narrative 118 pages, counting eight pages of translator s notes feels like an epic. Here is history compressed to the density of a poem.

The novel begins on the first day of August 1914 (the marking of time will be a theme), in a radiant pastoral landscape. A cyclist, Anthime, looks down from a hill on the market towns below, disturbed only by a loud unseasonable eruption of wind rampaging everywhere. When it dies away, he hears church bells somberly ringing the tocsin, a signal of mobilization. That noisy, disorderly gust of wind is no clumsy symbol. It is as close as we will get to an analysis or explanation of the hostilities to come. Unseen forces, natural and naturally indifferent, are about to sweep Anthime and his friends toward the trenches of the Somme.

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Echenoz s novels are often the opposite of realistic playful fantasies in which characters bounce in and out of sight like acrobats on a trampoline, with plots that hopscotch wildly over time and space. But in 1914 numerous details pin us to a precise historical reality: the brand name of a camera, the Rêve Idéal, or the ­ licorice-brown canvas of a French soldier s knapsack. In a Farman F-37 biplane, one of the crew members pulls out a Savage pistol especially adapted for aviation, fitted with a screen to catch spent casings so they won t stray into the propeller.

Such authenticity creates a world of objects that are brought to life by Echenoz s unmistakable voice. Witty, passionate, by turns intimate and coolly distant, it is a voice fond of long, lovingly assembled Rabelaisian lists that provide a perfect foil to the chaos of combat. One remarkable chapter describes all the notable animals of World War I, from the largest and most useful (cows) to the smallest and most hated (lice), with a bleak coda on the rat. Another inventories the astonishing variety of furniture woods in a bedroom and concludes that they do not get along, they cannot even stand one another.

At times this form of narration may strike readers as grotesquely dispassionate. Horrifying scenes are rendered in a tone drained of all emotion: Anthime and Bossis could see the incineration of two airmen killed on impact and still strapped in, transformed into sizzling skeletons hanging by their seat straps. Elsewhere, Echenoz defuses shock with ludicrous mathematics: a bullet travels 40 feet through the air at 3,280 feet per second at an altitude of 2,300 feet to enter the left eye of Noblès.

And then, unexpectedly, an image flies off the page to create a human context: A piece of shrapnel is as clipped as a postscript: an iron fragment shaped like a polished Neolithic ax, smoking hot. Or the downy lightness of Echenoz s French perfectly captured by the translator, Linda Coverdale turns grimly lyric. In a town emptied of all its young men, Blanche sees only old fellows and kids, whose footsteps sound hollow on a stage too large for them.

And once or twice, Echenoz s profound and hopeless fury, held in check by the brevity and reserve of his storytelling, breaks through the latticework of words: We all know the rest. --New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Editions Du Seuil
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 2707322571
• ISBN 13: 9782707322579
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 123