The French Art of War
James Pringle
Carl Robinson recently mentioned to VOH that he had read Michel Houellebecq’s ‘haunting’ French novel SUBMISSION. He said it ‘is required reading these days.’
I’ve had the book for about a year and have still to get started on it. It is called in the blurbs “electrifying, extraordinary and captivating.”
I have, however, learned something of the reading of the two leading Vietnamese leaders, and this may interest some of the Old Hacks.
the border with China. oIt seems, to quote my own story in the London Times in June 1991, that Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh lived for some years on the West Pac resistance base where Son Tung, a party member who was perhaps Vietnam’s leading expert on Ho’s life, knew something about the Ho’s anticolonial war against the French.
When Ho lived in London in World War One he ordered Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be translated into Vietnamese and later he recited the play to the troops in the forest.
Not only Shakespeare was honored by Ho when he was working as a pastry cook at London’s Carlton Hotel, Ho also discovered Scottish literature in the person of Sir Walter Scott. Ho’s favorite novel was Scott’s ‘’Ivanhoe,” a romantic work of the age of chivalry.
The heroine of Scott’s book, unusually for the time, was a Jewish girl, Rebecca. Robin Hood, who ‘stole from the rich to give to the poor,’ also features in the novel.
Son Tung said that when he was in the Vietnamese jungle again Ho told the story of Ivanhoe to while away, no doubt, long nights in the forest.
Not to be outdone, General Vo Nugyen Giap, (with whom I had a exclusive interview in Hanoi at the time) said on the subject of books that he was never without a copy of T.E Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” a study of the Arabs fighting against the Germans and others in the Middle East in world war one. Giap called this classic his 'fighting gospel.’
By the way, Ho dated a British girl while he was London between 1915 to 1916 – remember Ho was still a young man then. It’s said the encounter only resulted in holding hands. Apparently the girl helped Ho with letters to the British when he was trying to make sure his father was safe.
But he had also had a ‘hand-holding’ session with a French girl at the time too.
How many hand holding sessions with girls without anything happening? He also had his girl friends while operating along Vietnam’s border with China, and reputedly had a child with a minority woman.
But Shakespeare, Lawrence of Arabia - how could the team of Uncle Ho and General Giap ever be beaten?
Ok, I will settle down now with Carl’s recommendation and read ‘Submission.’ It had better be good!
J. Pringle
Paris
From: vietnam-...@googlegroups.com [mailto:vietnam-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Carl Robinson
Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2017 2:53 PM
To: Vietnam Old Hacks
Subject: The French Art of War.
As a Francophone - but not necessarily Francophile and more of a Belgian Congo one - I've always been fascinated in France's modern-day colonial wars in which, of course, Vietnam played a starring role and followed by Algeria, of course. This was clearly a historic and cultural heritage which we experienced in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Here's a comprehensive review from The Weekend Australian of a novel by Alexis Jenni and translated by Frank Wynn, entitled The French Art of War, which includes elements of France's war in Indochina -- and the modern-day back-home legacy of those wars. (In style, the reviewer harks to the writing style of Michel Houellebecq who wrote the haunting novel Submission which I'd say is required reading these days.)
Sounds like it might be worth a read. And quite a thick novel too at over 600 pages -- and going right onto my shopping list.
Any VOHers read this yet -- in the original or translation?
Best regards,
Carl
Conflict defines peace in Alexis Jenni’s The French Art of War
Actor Jean Martin as Colonel Mathieu in 1965 film The Battle of Algiers.
· PETER PIERCE
· The Australian
· 12:00AM July 1, 2017
· Save
·
In May, new French President Emmanuel Macron took his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on a tour of the Gallery of Great Battles at Versailles. Opened in 1837, its specially commissioned paintings celebrate nearly 15 centuries of French triumphs, from Clovis to Napoleon’s victory at Wagram in 1809. Nothing about Moscow? Putin might have wondered.
An altogether different traverse of national military history occupies Alexis Jenni’s superb first published novel, The French Art of War, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2011.
The novel opens in 1991. The unnamed narrator watches the Gulf war on television (a war French theorist Jean Baudrillard jestingly argued never happened) as he drifts out of his job and heads home to Lyon. There he encounters an elderly painter, Victorien Salagnon, who is a 23-year veteran of wars, as a youthful member of the Resistance, then in colonial conflicts in Vietnam and Algeria. A bargain is struck: if the narrator animates and reshapes Salagnon’s stolid memoirs, he will teach him to paint.
In The French Art of War, there are commentaries that contain the narrator’s own story, not only his interactions with Salagnon and his wife Eurydice, whom he rescued from the Hades of Algiers, but of the breakdown of his own marriage and then a strange, perhaps only imagined, late love affair.
These alternate with six sections called novel that relate Salagnon’s life as a soldier as the narrator has reconstructed it. Apparently very different stories — domestic and martial — become the more powerful through their connection.
On the one hand is the melancholy, intelligent narrator who initially had gone back to Lyons “to put an end to things” but who then establishes a traditional, outwardly comfortable bourgeois existence with a good job, a flat and a wife called Oceane (alike “beautiful”) that he destroys, maybe out of disgust at the surfeit in his life. On the other is the reserved war veteran Salagnon, for whom “painting save my life and soul”, whose voice the narrator assumes to tell the exemplary story of the last of the French colonial wars and of the “splintering” country that is their legacy.
Throughout the novel Jenni speaks urgently: “By 1939 France was in excellent shape to fight the battles of 1915”; its soon occupied populace made themselves as small as possible “to give no purchase to the winds of history”.
Cracking up, the narrator ruefully recognises that “I am gradually uninstalling myself”. Of the racial division in France that is principally the issue of its colonial past, the novel has much to say: “Race in France has substance but no definition”; “the French all collude in using the word ‘they’ ”.
If the pieds noirs (displaced European Algerians) “are our guilty conscience”, the French are also angrily agitated by the Muslims who have settled among them: “two black veils floated past with people inside them”, “two shrouds with eyes”. In such passages, the note of exultant pessimism has much in common with Jenni’s great contemporary among French novelists, Michel Houellebecq, another Goncourt winner and controversialist.
The French Art of War works on a much broader historical canvas than Houellebecq has ventured, proceeding, however, not so much chronologically but by vignette. Thus Jenni salutes Paul Teitjen, secretary-general of police in Algiers, who quietly insisted on listing the names of all those taken into custody by the army, usually to be tortured. This is “a census of the dead”, fit and grisly counterpart to the arrest of “24,000 men without knowing what a single one of them had done”.
The massacre of French civilians by the Germans at Porquigny is one of Salagnon’s earliest memories of war. His own instruction in painting comes from an Annamese aristocrat in Hanoi: lessons that end when the old man is butchered. There are set-piece accounts of bloody and bungled ambushes in Vietnam and Algeria.
The narrator’s life also is punctuated by nightmarish incidents: the ghastly dinner party that he contrives to end his marriage, the queuing at a locked all-night pharmacy, the uncovering of a cemetery in waste ground near the once-prized tower blocks where he spent his childhood.
One implication of The French Art of War is that the nation has not yet woken from its dream of imperial eminence, one of the fictions spun by Charles de Gaulle, “the greatest liar of all time”, whom the narrator ironically dubs The Novelist.
Student of history, the narrator is also a devotee of war films. How much of his memories of Apocalypse Now are instinct in his description of the journey that Salagnon takes up river in Vietnam? Another film is explicitly mentioned, although some readers will already have thought of it. This is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), which had been long banned in France. The narrator finds the film as false as any fabrication by de Gaulle: “packaging history and handing the military republic of Algeria the basis for its myths”.
By contrast, what he fashions from Salagnon’s memoir asks to be granted a moral and emotional integrity, for all that one terrible question is long begged. When the narrator finally asks “did you torture?”, Salagnon’s answer was that they did much worse: “we failed humanity”.
Apart from much else — for instance, the ripe illustration of what fecund fictional territory the Vietnam war remains — The French Art of War is a jagged rejoinder to the glories on the walls of Versailles, and a triumph of Jenni’s ambition and elan.
The French Art of War
By Alexis Jenni
Translated by Frank Wynn
Atlantic Books, 624pp, $32.99
Peter Pierce is an author and critic.
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