Synopses & Reviews
A literary event: the long-awaited translation of one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction.
Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is Roger Martin du Gard's magnum opus, the crowning achievement of a career that included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937.
Written over the final eighteen years of his life and intended to be read only posthumously, this tremendous creation sprang from the writer's unflinching examination of the conundrum of our moral ambivalence: why, knowing what is right, do people do wrong? Martin du Gard's complex response constitutes one of the most devastating critiques of human behavior ever produced.
The author casts his reflections in the form of a memoir written by Bertrand de Maumort, an aristocrat, a soldier, an intellectual -- ostensibly the very flower of European culture at its zenith. Born in 1870, Maumort grows up in a ch&3226;teau where a series of enlightened tutors tend to his education. Later, while preparing to enter the French military academy, he lives with his Uncle Eric, a powerful academic whose Sunday at-homes attract such luminaries as Renan, Turgenev, Daudet, and Pasteur. Keenly aware of his advantages, Maumort aspires to self-knowledge and a transcendent objectivity in his relations with the world. But as he describes his progress through life -- his early childhood, his experiences in the sexual hothouse of a Catholic boarding school, his affair with the beautiful Creole Doudou, his failed marriage to a sweet but adamantly conventional bourgeoise, his service in Morocco under the legendary colonialist General Lyautey, his participation in the First World War, and the occupation of his beloved ch&3226;teau by German troops in the Second -- he unwittingly betrays an underside: his prejudices, self-deceptions, and moral lapses. Through his portrayal of Maumort and a fascinating array of secondary characters, Martin du Gard dissects mankind in general, and calls into question whether true civilization, much less human progress, exists at all. The result is a work of extraordinary honesty, combining the sweep of his acknowledged master Tolstoy, the penetrating analysis of Proust, and the speculative profundity of Montaigne.
Left unfinished at the time of the author's death, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort did not appear in print until 1983, when a definitive edition was established in French. Now, after seven years of preparation, Martin du Gard's splendid accomplishment, destined to be recognized as one of the summits of modern literature, is available to readers in this superb English translation.
About the Author
Roger Martin du Gard was born on March 23, 1881, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Trained as a paleographer, he turned to fiction in his early twenties, and in 1913 produced his first major work, Jean Barois. In 1920 he embarked on an eight-part family saga, The Thibaults, receiving the Nobel Prize in 1937 for its seventh volume, Summer 1914, a narrative of the tribulations of the Thibault brothers as they face the approach of the First World War. A prolific author who lived in the country and devoted himself almost solely to his vocation, he also wrote several plays, a brilliant novella about incest (Confidence Africaine), a book memorializing his long friendship with André Gide, and one of the century's great diaries. It was between the German occupation of France in 1940 and his last days in 1958 that Martin du Gard composed Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. The novel's inclusion in the prestigious Plé iade series when it first appeared in 1983 confirmed its status as a classic.
About the translators:
Luc Brébion, Ph.D., is a writer, translator, and lecturer on aesthetics.
Timothy Crouse is the author of The Boys on the Bus and of numerous articles for Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker.