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This novel won France’s highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt, in 2013.

To summarize from the blurbs: two French WW I veterans find themselves in a society whose “reverence for its dead cannot quite match its resentment for those who survived.�� They are penniless. One lost the lower half of his face and is morphine addicted. Physically and psychologically destroyed by the war, both are cut off from their families (one man is gay, abandoned and disowned by his father) and the men seeks revenge against the country they feel has abandoned them.

They still fear a lieutenant from the war who, trying to make a name for himself in the last ten days before the peace, kills two of his own men and tried to kill the two men who are the main characters in the book.



There’s a lot more to the plot (it’s almost 500 pages) but much of the book is about two swindles; one real and one fictitious.

The real swindle, researched by the author, was a scandal in France after the war. Imagine the impact of loved ones finding out how the bodies of their lost sons, brothers and fathers were treated. We are used to seeing pictures of row upon row of soldiers�� graves in neatly arranged cemeteries. And we are used to seeing war dead returned with honor guards. But that’s not how it was in the heat of battle in the trench warfare of WW I. Bodies were tossed into pits, gullies and bomb craters and hastily buried.

What occurred after the war wasn’t pretty either. An illicit practice started where wealthy people paid soldiers to reveal where their loved ones were buried and then paid others to retrieve their bodies for burial. After the war a massive operation was undertaken by France to find and exhume bodies for proper burial in the national war cemeteries.



Companies bid on contracts that went to the low bidders. Chinese and African immigrants did most of this nasty work. Most were illiterate, certainly in French. They could not read “dog tags�� or other identifying paperwork, so bodies were mixed up. Paid “by the coffin,�� German war dead were sometimes interred as French soldiers. Empty coffins were assigned names and buried. The companies scrimped on the size of coffins, sometimes cutting off heads or feet to fit bodies into the smallest coffin possible. Personal items and clothing were stolen. One company even paid grave workers for dentures stolen from the dead.

After the war, every town tried to outdo its neighbors in building monuments to honor their war dead. The two destitute men, left to shift for themselves, resent this extravagance on the dead while living veterans are largely ignored. Here’s the fake scandal: Since the injured man is an excellent artist, he concocts a scheme with the help of his buddy to sell war memorials and receive down payments for projects that will never be built.

There is good writing. Some samples:

“He hiked up the front of his pants as if to say: I could do with a drink now.��

“…so many trips, so many meetings, scarcely time to screw his wife’s friends; this government order was taking up all his time and energy.��

“Having no one and nothing in his life �� not even a cat �� everything was about him, his existence had curled in on itself like a dry leaf around an empty space.��

[Of the town mayor who simply rambled when he spoke]: “What did it mean, this prolixity? It was impossible to tell. Labourdin constructed sentences from sounds rather than ideas.��

“It sounded as though he had spent much time thinking about the question but never about the answer.��



A great read �� I’ll give it a 4.5 and round up to ��5.��

Top photo from thoughtco.com
Photo of Etaples Military Cemetery from tripadvisor.com.uk
Photo of the author from elperiodico.com