Fields of Glory: Les champs d’honneur

Categories: Award Winners , Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction

For a first novel, this little book made it big—the author of Fields of Glory, Jean Rouaud, went from selling newspapers to being the 1990 winner of the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. 

I read the book in its English translation by Ralph Manheim in 1992, and it’s one of the books that have stayed with me over many years.  It’s tiny (only about 150 pages) and gently effortless to read, but it’s indelible.

The unnamed narrator, one of the grandchildren of a family in a little Loire Valley town pays tribute to his eccentric elders—his grandparents and his Great-Aunt Marie—whose lives were long ago altered by the Great War. 

At first, the humorous stories of their oddities charm and amuse.  There’s Aunt Marie’s card catalog of saints and their specialized responsibilities, Grandmother’s martyrdom to Grandfather’s notoriously dangerous driving, and so on.  But gradually the stories become more poignant.

The narrator comes to realize that his elders are more than just a collection of eccentrics.  The deeply moving story of the World War I deaths of Aunt Marie’s brothers and the trip Grandfather made to retrieve one brother’s body from a battlefield grave dominate the last part of the book.   

This is the first of a cycle of autobiographical novels about the generations as indelibly marked by war as is the French countryside, where plows still turn up bones and bombs.  Lovingly realized characters and a richly sympathetic nostalgia for both the people and the landscape of home make it unforgettable.