Age is part of it but salaries, perks, and gratuities are the main cause of that deformity”. businessmen and politicians have always had a problem with bulges, with the paunch. The Assembly President, Herriot, is described in this manner: “It was twelve-fifteen and the president buttoned his jacket, as politicians and businessmen habitually do by a kind of conditional reflex. That does not matter one whit, as Vuillard deftly sketches each of these real people. Unless one is a history buff, it is highly unlikely that names such as Dupont, Brusset, Herriot, Djemad, Mendès, De Lattre or de La Croix de Castries mean anything at all. As with The War Of The Poor, it is not difficult to find echoes and parallels in the present. The title refers to the problem the French had, caught in a cleft stick between the necessity of extricating themselves and the need to save face. Although there are passages detailing what things were like on the ground, equally there are sections on the corridors of power back in Paris. The book plots the ghastliness from the first misgivings about the wisdom of the endeavour up to the fall of Saigon. Although most Anglophone readers will have an idea about Vietnam or Korea or Aden even, the French conflict in Indochina, against Ho Chi Minh, has far less traction.

I am reminded of the scurry to publish when Jean-Marie Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature: funny how an accolade makes readers here look at literature in translation.Īn Honourable Exit is a remarkable work. Although this is his 12th work of – whatever-you-call-it – it is only the fourth translated into English. You can, frankly, call it whatsoever you like – I shall say it is not-non-fiction – when the writing is as excoriating and profound as Vuillard’s is here. It seems a rather French phenomenon, given works like Laurent Binet’s HHhH or Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows On The World, a real time narrative of 9/11. To make things more confusing, he was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for Fiction for The Order Of The Day, even though it was insistent on the grounded reality of the past (in that case the rise of the Nazis), as indeed were The War Of The Poor, about early modern religious conflict, and Sorrows Of The Earth, about Buffalo Bill. There are various English terms, such as “faction”, or “docu-novel”, or the awkward “historical novelisation”. French critics have used the word “récit”, meaning story or narration, and therefore distinct from “roman” – novel – or “histoire” – history. Exactly what kind of book does Éric Vuillard write? It seems to be a matter in some dispute.

Hhhh book