Fear : A Novel of World War I Paperback - 2014

"Chevallier’s book...represents that rarest of war narratives—one that is indispensable, nearly unprecedented, and painfully relevant....What makes Chevallier’s book a masterpiece is the lucidity of the author’s eyewitness account; its prose moves from practical concerns like picking lice to poetic reverie in the space of a paragraph, capturing the chaos of war and the stillness of the battlefield, revealing a terrible beauty." —Publishers Weekly starred review

"A chronological burst of battle stories and vindictive reflections on the paradox of war, Fear  is structurally similar to Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel, while readers of Céline (a contemporary of Chevallier's) will catch whiffs of the sardonic misanthropy that runs through Journey to the End of Night. Dartemont deconstructs the notions of duty and heroism and draws their origins in fear and ignorance while letting us rifle through his blood-stained sketchbook with images from a war that grws ever more distant in our memories." —Booklist

"Its first-person narration by a young soldier who, like the author, was wounded in battle, hospitalized, returned to the front and remained an infantryman until the armistice reads like a cross between the darkest humor and the bleakest reportage....the themes of what [Chevallier] calls “this anti-war book” are timeless: the folly of nationalism, the foolish pomposity of military leaders, the arbitrariness of death, the madness of war." —Kirkus Reviews

“Reading Fear feels like being led through the damnation panel of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the front line ‘blazing like some infernal factory where monstrous crucibles melted human flesh into a bloody lava.’ Fear remains a bravura work, fearless from start to finish, pitiless in its targets, passionate in its empathy.” —Neil Fitzgerald, TLS

“Gabriel Chevallier’s autobiographical novel about serving in the bombed-out trenches of World War I still chills the blood. In indelible passages it describes the sensory degradation of war on the human body. Translated into English by Malcolm Imrie without a hint of stiltedness, Chevallier’s long-neglected novel is one of the most effective indictments of war ever written.” —Tobias Grey, The Wall Street Journal

“If Fear has an English equivalent it is The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning or, in German, Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, each of which give a view of the war from the perspective of lowly infantrymen, and both of whom, like Chevallier, remain stoutly immune to the old lie that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” —The Sunday Telegraph
 
“Gabriel Chevallier, best known for his magnificent novel Clochemerle, has used his experiences during World War I to produce a work of great intensity, comparable to such great literary masterpieces of the period as Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire.” —The Daily Mail

  “The most beautiful book ever written on the tragic events that blood-stained Europe for nearly five years.” —Le Libertaire

Gabriel Chevallier (1895-1969) was the son of a notary clerk and lived in Lyon for most of his life. He was called up at the start of World War I and wounded a year later. Returning to the front, he spent the remainder of the war as an infantryman, and was ultimately awarded the Croix de Guerre and named Chevalier de la Lgion d'Honneur. He began writing Fear in 1925 but did not publish it until 1930, a year after his first novel, Durand: voyageur de commerce, was released. Fear was suppressed during World War II and not made available again until 1951, by which time Chevallier had earned international fame for his Clochemerle (1934), a comedy of provincial French manners of the Beaujolais region that sold several million copies. In all Chevallier would write twenty-one novels, including several more set in the fictional village of Clochemerle.

John Berger is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including To the Wedding, the Into Their Labours trilogy, About Looking, Ways of Seeing, and G., for which he won the Booker Prize. His most recent book is Understanding a Photograph, a collection of his writings about photography, edited by Geoff Dyer. He lives in a small rural community in France.

Malcolm Imrie's translations from the French include Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle and Jos Pierre's Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1928-1932. His translation of Gabriel Chevallier's Fear won the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the most prestigious award for a French-to-English translation.