'Matterhorn' in French

 

We just received word that Karl Marlantes’s powerful 2010 best-selling Vietnam War novel, Matterhorn , is being released tomorrow for the first time in French with a slight title change: Retour a Matterhorn (Calmann-Levy, 610 pp., 22.90 Euro, paperback)

The publication in French is more good news about this brilliant, combat-heavy in-country tale told mainly through the eyes of a young Marine LT named Mellas. The story bores in on Mellas’s company of Marines and a seemingly never-ending succession of bloody combat action. The action is set primarily in and around the mountaintop fire support base that gives the book its incongruous title.

Marlantes, who went to Yale and gave up his Rhodes Scholarship (he later got it back) to volunteer for Vietnam,  does many things well in this book. His characters seem real; his dialogue rings true for the most part. The action scenes evoke Vietnam War combat at its most intense—and its most horrible. Marlantes, who received the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award in August,  is not shy about providing page after page of intimate descriptions of death and dismemberment.

As Sebastian Junger said in his New York Times review of the book, “Chapter after chapter, battle after battle, Marlantes pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered.”

 

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