cover image Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort

Roger Martin Du Gard. Alfred A. Knopf, $35 (816pp) ISBN 978-0-679-43397-2

Although a Nobel Prize winner in 1937, Martin du Gard is largely unrecognized in America, but this last, unfinished novel, masterfully translated, should lift the late novelist out of stateside obscurity. The story begins in 1940, when a 70-year-old military officer, Bertrand de Maumort, begins his memoirs, evoking the belle poque France of his youth, and offering a kind of personal resistance to the encroaching Nazis. Bertrand's mother died in childbirth, and he was raised by his father, a laconic military officer who presided over his rural French estate with cold hauteur. Young Bertrand is close to his sister, Henriette, and to his governesses, but when his sickly, debauched cousin, Guy, arrives, the innocent youth is introduced to the obsessions of sex. Guy plays a game of escalating sexual teasing with a tutor, who has pederastic inclinations that later lead to his suicide; the unfortunate Guy dies shortly after his flirtation with the tutor. De Maumort's painstaking analysis of his earliest erotic feelings and his concern throughout with the sexual lives of his contemporaries are strongly reminiscent of Proust. Bertrand goes to boarding school, and then to the Sorbonne, ostensibly to get into Saint-Cyr, the military academy. He mingles with the intellectuals in the circle around his uncle, a famous sociologist, and his wife. At the halfway point of this massive book, the protagonist is 19, embarking on his first love affair, with C lie, an older woman from Martinique. The second half of the narrative consists of fragments, accompanied by research notes and commentary by scholars and the author, sketching the proposed trajectory of Bertrand in the colonial war in Morocco, and during the Dreyfus period in France. This novel provides a panoramic view of the French bourgeoisie and richly details the intellectual, sexual and emotional development of a thoughtful and winning hero; the incompleteness of Bertrand's story only heightens the appeal of this complex character. (Jan.)