Of Illustrious Men

Starred review from October 31, 1994
The withered, pious Aunt Marie is still in the little house in the garden. French cars are still a problematic breed. And Rouaud is still one of the most capable chroniclers of French bourgeois life. Like Annie Ernaux, Rouaud excavates the history of one family from the lower Loire valley, but he does so with infinite tenderness. While the Prix Goncourt-winning Fields of Glory portrayed the maternal grandparents he knew and the paternal family destroyed by WWI, this volume depicts the narrator's father, Joseph. A responsible, capable and loving man, Joseph criss-crossed Brittany selling porcelain and glassware six days a week. On the seventh, he often packed his family into the car and indulged in his avocation-collecting rocks, mostly large, all meant for a fountain that was never built. Years of moving heavy boxes of samples-and stones-destroyed Joseph's invertebral discs and undermined his health. Again, Rouaud delves farther into Joseph's history, one as sharply determined by WWII as the earlier generation's was by the Great War. This story is, if anything, even more poignant than its predecessor, relieved by fewer lovingly recorded absurdities. Rouaud's images are always beautiful, and even the most banal scene has the warm luminescence of an autumn afternoon. ``When Monsieur So-and-So, who progressed with metronomic regularity from one bistro to the next, came staggering up to his last port of call, everyone knew that it was two in the afternoon... and that Madame So-and-So, his wife, had been waiting stoically since the end of High Mass, her handbag on her knees in the last remaining car parked in the square.''

November 15, 1994
Rouaud's first novel, Fields of Glory (LJ 3/15/92), won the Prix Goncourt. His second is a quiet, affectionate portrait of a father's life and death as viewed by his 11-year-old son. Joseph is portrayed first as a traveling salesman from Brittany who smokes too much but who is well received wherever he goes. He seems indefatigable but becomes ill and dies early, at age 41. The novel then goes back in time to his young manhood. During that period he escapes being sent to a Nazi work camp and works for the French Resistance. The sly humor of the French peasants is deftly revealed, the pastoral scenes are beautifully drawn, and the war scene is riveting. The chronological reversal of two parts of the story is slightly confusing, as is the shift in narrative voice, but overall this book is delightful. Recommended for literary collections.-Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.

November 1, 1994
Within six months in the mid-1960s, death took from young Rouaud and his sisters their 41-year-old father, a great-aunt who lived with them, and their grandfather. "Fields of Glory" (1992), Rouaud's first novel, won France's highest fiction honor, the Prix Goncourt, in 1990 for its moving portrait of the stoicism and idiosyncrasies of his grandparents' generation: Loire Valley villagers whose hopes and lives were unalterably scarred by the First World War. "Of Illustrious Men" again sets an elegiac tone as Rouaud honors the death and celebrates the life of his father. Part one sketches Joseph as his son remembers him: a loving, somewhat distant parent; a respected citizen of his small village; a crockery salesman traveling Brittany on behalf of Quimper; a man with "a passion for ancient stones"; an inventive visionary whose life allowed him too little scope for exercising his gifts. This section closes with Joseph's shattering, utterly unexpected death. Part two explores Joseph's earlier life: his lonely childhood; his escape from a forced-labor train headed for Germany; his work in the Resistance; his wartime introduction to the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his children. Readers will agree that Joseph, in his quiet way, is indeed an "illustrious man." Another powerful transmutation of personal, individual pain into affecting, universal narrative. ((Reviewed November 1, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)