Fear

An NYRB Classics Original

Winner of the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from the French

Fear is a classic of war literature, a book to place on the shelf with Storm of Steel, A Farewell to Arms, and Going After Cacciato. Jean Dartemont, the hero of Gabriel Chevallier’s autobiographical novel, enters what was not yet known as World War I in 1915, when it was just beginning to be clear that a war that all the combatants were initially confident would move swiftly to a conclusion was instead frozen murderously in place. After enduring the horrors of the trenches and the deadly leagues of no-man’s-land stretching beyond them, Jean is wounded and hospitalized. Away from the front, he confronts the relentless blindness of the authorities and much of the general public to the hideous realities of modern, mechanized combat. Jean decides he must resist. How? By telling the simple truth. Urged to encourage new recruits with tales of derring-do service, Jean does not mince words. What did he do on the battlefield? He responds like a man: “I was afraid.”

Acclaimed as “the most beautiful book ever written on the tragic events that blood-stained Europe” for five years, prosecuted on first publication as an act of sedition, Fear appears for the first time in the United States in Malcolm Imrie’s poetic and prizewinning translation on the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the conflict with which the twentieth century came into its own. Chevallier’s masterpiece remains, in the words of John Berger, “a book of the utmost urgency and relevance.”

Gabriel Chevallier (1895–1969) was a French novelist widely known as the author of the satire Clochemerle, which was written in 1934, translated into twenty-six languages, and sold several million copies. Born in Lyon, Chevallier was called up at the start of World War I and wounded a year later, but returned to the front where he served as an infantryman until the war’s end. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and named Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.

John Berger is an art critic, novelist, painter, and poet, whose books include 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 Cataract: Some Notes After Having a Cataract Removed. 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 Jose Pierre’s Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1928–1932. His translation of Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear won the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize, the most prestigious award for French to English translation.