On the TBR List

Yep, I'm adding The Centurions by Jean Larteguty to my To Be Read list (see here).

For just a moment I thought I was going to read about Devil's Guard (no, not The Devil's Brigade, but the book about the SS officers who run off to join the French Foreign Legion) when I began reading this WSJ article by James D. Hornfischer.

The anguish of the U.S. experience in Vietnam reverberates in some of our best fiction, from Philip Caputo’s “Indian Country” (1987) and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (1990) to Karl Marlantes’s “Matterhorn” (2009). But in literature, as in the war itself, the French got there first.

Now, I'd rather not get into my disdain for The Things They Carried, which I belive too many people like for the wrong reasons, but anyone who has read the out of print Devil's Guard can clearly see why I would have thought that's where the article was going. But No! Now I have a new book to read.

Devil's Guard was Holy Writ in our Ranger Platoon. We bought a copy for three hundred dollars back in 1996 and carried it around in a plastic bag from deployment to deployment and forced the new privates to read it and quote from it. Still, The Centurions sounds like a good companion as well, although it sounds like reading it might be a hard slog.

Though it has been heralded as the first novel to feature a “ticking time bomb” storyline, “The Centurions” was not built to satisfy readers looking for crisp plotting, suspense and action. With its extended speechifying, incomplete character arcs, female love interests cut from wet cardboard, and company of minor characters who march to little effect, Lartéguy’s work is more symposium than thriller. When the Frenchmen aren’t holding forth on the sweep of history and the hinge of fate, they are writing long diary entries summing up many things that the reader already knows. Some of the monologues run for pages at a time. But the depth of the principals and the author’s sure sense of their complex torment bring the soldiers’ world vibrantly to life.

I don't know, after reading about "wet cardboard" love interests and "writing long diary entries" perhaps I'd be better off just reading my copy of Devil's Guard again.