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A Son at the Front par Edith Wharton
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A Son at the Front (original 1923; édition 1995)

par Edith Wharton (Auteur)

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1457187,110 (3.17)12
Wharton's antiwar masterpiece, now once again available, probes the devastation of World War I on the home front. Interweaving her own experiences of the Great War with themes of parental and filial love, art and self-sacrifice, national loyalties and class privilege, Wharton tells an intimate and captivating story of war behind the lines.… (plus d'informations)
Membre:JMigotsky
Titre:A Son at the Front
Auteurs:Edith Wharton (Auteur)
Info:Northern Illinois University Press (1995), 239 pages
Collections:En cours de lecture, À lire, Lus mais non possédés
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Mots-clés:to-read, goodreads

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A son at the front par Edith Wharton (1923)

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39. A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton
OPD: 1923
format: 247-page kindle ebook, pub 2019
acquired: June 30 read: Jun 30 – Jul 15 time reading: 9:28, 2.3 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Classic Fiction theme: Wharton
locations: Paris & France before and during WWI
about the author: 1862-1937. Born Edith Newbold Jones on West 23rd Street, New York City. Relocated permanently to France after 1911.

Wharton, a well-to-do American living in Paris during WWI, wrote a novel that somewhat parallels her experience. What's odd is that she chose an unpleasant main character, a self-centered artist and divorcé, who put his art before his family. His divorce was, in a way, due to his own neglect of his family as he pursued his art career. He's also the father of a miliary-age, French born American son, legally required to join the French army in case of war. And when he finally really tries to connect with his son, WWI intervenes.

We can relate to John Campton, regardless. And what comes across is partially a personal story, and partially a window into the American expat experience in Paris. It's maybe an important novel because this perspective of WWI. (Wharton had some kind of trouble getting support from her publisher, forcing her to delay and focus on other novels, like [The Age of Innocence].) But it's not her best constructed novel. It lingers plotless here and there, leaving us readers stuck with this unpleasant dad in some drama doldrums. But is still has that Wharton prose.
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2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351556#8200794 ( )
  dchaikin | Aug 2, 2023 |
Wharton's writing is simply gorgeous. The story is mainly seen from the parents' point of view, especially John Campton, George's father. The horrors of what parents go through when their child goes to war are riveting, yet I wanted to view the war more through George's eyes since he is the son of said title. Still a pick mainly for Wharton's understanding of France during such a turbulent period of history. ( )
1 voter crabbyabbe | Jul 17, 2023 |
John Campton is a renowned painter, an American living in Paris for years and more French than American in reality. His ex-wife has married a very wealthy banker, and the two of them vie for the love and attentions of their only son, George. Although Julia, the ex-wife, is also American, George was born on French soil, so he is of dual citizenship.

At the beginning of the story, Campton is planning a trip for himself and George, a chance to spend some private time together, but before they can embark on their journey, hostilities reach a breaking point and World War I erupts as Germany invades Belgium. Campton considers his son an American, but the French have him on their military roles and he is conscripted into the French army.

What ensues is a story full of sorrow and enlightenment as George and his father navigate the changing, and sometimes conflicted, feelings toward the cause before them. As the casualties begin to pile up and people begin to understand the nature of the conflict, Campton must struggle with his desire to keep his son safe and his realization that this war and its demanded sacrifices belong to every man, and most particularly to every Frenchman.

The killing of René Davril seemed to Campton one of the most senseless crimes the war had yet perpetrated. It brought home to him, far more vividly than the distant death of poor Jean Fortin, what an incalculable sum of gifts and virtues went to make up the monster’s daily meal.

What is the most unique about this book is that we follow the war, the loss, the effect through the eyes of a father. There are so many other books that show us the war from the soldier's point of view, but this is the angst of the ones who cannot participate and can only watch as all they love is put at risk. We are walked through Campton’s attempts to understand his son’s experiences and developing attitudes with only secondhand information to draw on.

He says he wants only things that last—that are permanent—things that hold a man fast. That sometimes he feels as if he were being swept away on a flood, and were trying to catch at things—at anything—as he’s rushed along under the waves… He says he wants quiet, monotony … to be sure the same things will happen every day. When we go out together he sometimes stands for a quarter of an hour and stares at the same building, or at the Seine under the bridges. But he’s happy, I’m sure… I’ve never seen him happier … only it’s in a way I can’t make out…

This is Edith Wharton at her best, as she deftly tears apart the surface of these two people and shows us everything that lies beneath. All the secondary characters, as well, are fully drawn and engaging, down to the elderly landlady who loses her son and then her grandsons to this spreading horror. And, while men die in droves, Americans in Paris wait and watch for America to understand what is at stake and enter the fray.

While reading, I thought of other novels I have read that have brought WWI home to me. [b:All Quiet on the Western Front|355697|All Quiet on the Western Front|Erich Maria Remarque|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632027397l/355697._SY75_.jpg|2662852] and [b:Testament of Youth|374388|Testament of Youth|Vera Brittain|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390091385l/374388._SY75_.jpg|364275] came to mind, and I felt Wharton was a significant addition to the canon, for she reveals yet another side of the horror. However, this novel is more universal than that, because it also deals with the intimate relationships that bind and separate people, the petty jealousy that prevents sharing and the small moments of understanding that create bonds that are unbreakable. So that, in the end, you might learn to see life, not only from your own view, but from that of others.

What did such people as Julia do with grief, he wondered, how did they make room for it in their lives, get up and lie down every day with its taste on their lips? Its elemental quality, that awful sense it communicated of a whirling earth, a crumbling Time, and all the cold stellar spaces yawning to receive us…

What an excellent work of art this book is. As I have often said, Edith Wharton is one of the great writers. I am in awe of how she can deliver, over and over again, books that leave such an impression upon the heart, the mind, and the soul. I will not be forgetting this one.


( )
  mattorsara | Aug 11, 2022 |
St. Barts 2012 #7 - I liked this book but did not love it. It has much of Wharton's signature writing style which is richly descriptive of people, especially their facial characteristics relative to their moods, etc. Much internal moral debating as to the 'proper way' to either feel or respond to a given situation. Lots of 'reacting' to a given situation based on assumptions, often wrong, rather than communicating. I did enjoy the perspective of American artists in Paris at the beginning of WWI....an odd place to be in that the country they were inhabiting was invaded by neighboring Germany, yet the USA remained neutral for quite sometime. An interesting study of the horrors of sending a loved one off to war. Another unique quality is that this is a war novel without battle details....it is a war novel from behind the front....a story of the attempt to live life as families wait to hear news of successes, failures and loss, and that is very cleverly done. A little overwrought overall, but i do love Wharton, and this is one that few take the opportunity to read. I only have a few left and i will have read her entire library of fiction. I will take my time with the few remaining. ( )
  jeffome | Jan 18, 2012 |
I love Edith Wharton but this is an awful, awful book.

"An anti-war masterpiece", says the back cover. More like a call to arms:

1. It reflects strong nationalism and anti-German sentiment which is often propaganda (Germany as "a nation of savages who ought to be hunted off the face of the globe like vermin").

2. It calls repeatedly for America to join in the war, which at one point leads Campton to say "Can't we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I wonder?" which is completely at odds with earlier statements (which resonated for me) about not wanting doddering old statesmen deciding to throw away young men's lives while in the comfort of their cigars and easy chairs.

3. The mindset of George and others evolves from indifference to believing that war was a moral necessity, and that they must not only go to war, but fight on the front line.

The plot is completely predictable and plods along behind the front amidst the rich who we care nothing about. There are coincidences such as the Spanish clairovoyant appearing in Paris which are absurd. Repeated references to George having been a Frenchman accidentally by birth and hence bound unjustly to fight in the war are overdone - here Wharton should have made the point once and deftly, and let the reader reflect on its irony.

The father, Campton, is self-centered and shallow, and yet he is the character with whom Wharton would like us to empathsize. His feelings of isolation on a "desert island" as travel war restricted, his need to "jog on without a servant" which was "very uncomfortable", and his need to have to "paint all the unpaintable people" because of the war all are ludicrous, as are his angst at selling sketches and later his difficulty in immersing himself in his painting. My, what hardships! They are completley uninteresting and ring hollow.

Wharton "writes what she knows": life in Paris among the well-to-do while World War I raged, but the reader longs to have the narrative transported to the front. She "writes what she knows", but in this case she knows very little about war, and did not create a novel with any significant emotional impact.

Quotes, starting with my favorite which appeared early on and which I took great delight in:

"Aeroplanes throwing bombs? Aeroplanes as engines of destruction? He had always thought of them as kind of giant kite that fools went up in when they were tired of breaking their necks in other ways. But aeroplane bombardment as a cause for declaring war?"

On isolation:
"His misfortune had been that he could neither get on easily with people nor live without them; could never wholly isolate himself in his art, nor yet resign himself to any permanent human communion that left it out, or, worse still, dragged it in irrelevantly."

On the history of civilizations rising and ultimately falling:
"All civilizations had their orbit; all societies rose and fell. Some day, no doubt, by the action of that law, everything that made the world livable to Campton and his kind would crumble in new ruins above the old. Yes - but woe to them by whom such things came; woe to the generation that bowed to such a law! The Powers of Darkness were always watching and seeking their hour; but the past was a record of their failures as well as their triumphs."

On Beauty:
"But after all there is the same instinct in us, the same craving, the same desire to realize Beauty, though you do it so magnificently and so - so objectively, and I ...' she paused, unclasped her hands, and lifted her lovely bewildered eyes, 'I do it only by a ribbon in my hair, a flower in a vase, a way of looping a curtain, or placing a lacquer screen in the right light. But I oughtn't to be ashamed of my limitations, do you think I ought? Surely every one ought to be helping to save Beauty; every one is needed, even the humblest and most ignorant of us, or else the world will be all death and ugliness. And after all, ugliness is the only real death, isn't it?"

On saying good-bye:
"They clasped hands in silence, each looking his fill of the other; then the crowd closed in, George exclaimed: 'My kit-bag!' and somehow, int he confusion, the parting was over, and Campton, straining blurred eyes, saw his son's smile - the smile of the light-hearted lad of old days - flash out at him from the moving train. For an instant the father had the illusion that it was the goodbye look of the boy George, going back to school after the holidays." ( )
  gbill | Apr 3, 2010 |
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Wharton's antiwar masterpiece, now once again available, probes the devastation of World War I on the home front. Interweaving her own experiences of the Great War with themes of parental and filial love, art and self-sacrifice, national loyalties and class privilege, Wharton tells an intimate and captivating story of war behind the lines.

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