C'est la guerre

paper 0-8101-6068-4 C’est la guerre ($59.95; paper $14.95; Jul.; 130 pp.; 0-8101-6032-3; paper 0-8101-6068-4): This 1993 novel from the French author of The Way It Works with Women (1998) is an impressionistic picture of street life in Paris under German occupation during WWII. The story’s a collection of fragmentary observations made by its nameless narrator (he’s 11 in 1939, when it begins); a mÇlange of experiences, overheard conversations, dreams, and fantasies. The matÇriel of the wartime experience—economic deprivation and black marketeering, the formation of the Resistance movement, wholesale sexual exploitation and irregularity—is quite effectively conveyed by a skillful alternation of (nicely translated) explosive sentence fragments with long, meandering, run-on revelations of its anonymous (in fact, generic) protagonist’s gradually developing predatory amorality, his realization that “If you know the tricks wartime’s a happy hunting ground.” A grim and powerfully convincing picture of ordeal and survival, all the more effective by virtue of its sedulous understatement.