un long dimanche de fiançailles

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
January 1917: five French soldiers are marched to their own front lines where they will be tossed out into no man's land with their hands tied behind their backs and left for the Germans to shoot. They were, in civilian life, variously a pimp, a mechanic, a farmer, a carpenter, and a fisherman; now they are condemned because each had sought to leave the war by shooting himself in the hand. Taken to a godforsaken trench nicknamed Bingo Crépuscule, the five are reluctantly sent out into the darkness; days later, five bodies are recovered and the families are notified, merely, that the men died in the line of duty.
August 1919: Mathilde Donnay receives a letter from a dying man. In it, the former soldier tells her that he met her beloved fiancé, the fisherman Manech, shortly before he died. Mathilde goes to meet Sergeant Daniel Esperanza at his hospital and there hears the story of the execution. She also receives a package with a photograph of the men and copies of their last letters. As Mathilde reads and rereads the letters and goes over Esperanza's tale, she begins to suspect that perhaps the story didn't end quite so neatly. And so begins her very long investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of five condemned prisoners--one of whom, at least, might not really be dead.

In Mathilde Donnay, Sebastien Japrisot has created one of the most compelling and delightful heroines in modern fiction. Though confined to a wheelchair since childhood, "Mathilde has other lives, varied and quite beautiful ones." She paints, cares for her pets, enjoys a rich fantasy life, and is relentless in her search for the truth about Manech's death. But she is by no means the only vibrant personality leaping off Japrisot's pages. This author has a remarkable ability to draw even minor characters in three dimensions with economy and wit. Take Mathilde's mother, for instance, caught in mid-card game: "At bridge, manille, bezique, Mama is a dirty rotten swine. Not only is she an ace with the pasteboards, but she throws her opponents off their mettle by insulting or making fun of them." And even the characters we meet only through other people's memories--the condemned men--are so fully realized that you find yourself torn over which one you hope may have survived. As Mathilde comes ever closer to solving the mystery of what happened at Bingo Crépuscule that January morning in 1917, Sebastien Japrisot proves himself a master storyteller and A Very Long Engagement a near perfect novel. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly
In 1917, a crippled young French woman searches for her fiance who was left to die on the front lines of WWI.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Dissatisfied with the official account of her fianc‚ Jean Etchevery's death in WW I, wheelchair-bound painter Mathilde Donnay resolves to find out the truth--with unexpectedly moving results at the end of a twisted trail. Etchevery, called ``Cornflower'' because of his youth, was one of five soldiers condemned to death for self-mutilation (shooting themselves in the hands), marched to the no-man's-land between the French and German lines, and left to die. But as Mathilde talks to the dying sergeant who was in charge of the detail and pores over the documents confirming the circumstances of the execution, telltale discrepancies (was one of the five corpses buried really wearing German boots? how explain a surviving corporal's suspicion that one or possibly two of the dead men weren't the ones he expected to see?) give her hope that Cornflower is still alive. As her researches gather more urgency, however, the years pass, survivors of the war die, memories fade, and documents disappear--leaving a trail utterly cold except for the puzzlingly contradictory stories related by the soldiers' families. Mathilde's father's lawyer urges her to give up her obsessive quest, and she finds that Germain Pire, an enterprising private detective who's urged her to hire him, has been concealing some of information he's turned up. The latest evidence suggests that a self-sacrificing corporal took the place of one of the dead--but was that one Cornflower, and if it was, why hasn't Mathilde been able to find him as late as 1924? As tricky as Japrisot's earlier bestsellers in his native France (The Passion of Women, 1990, etc.)--but also precisely, surprisingly evocative of the lingering pain of mourning and the burdens of survival. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
'Diabolically clever...The reader is alternately impressed, beguiles, frightened, bewildered...A considerable achievement' Anita Brookner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review


"Riveting...A fierce, elliptical novel that's both a gripping psychological thriller and highly moving meditation on the emotional consequence of war." ---Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A kind of latter-day War and Peace...This is a book that is many things: a war story, a story of official corruption, an idyll of young summer love, and a rich and most original panorama of French men and women living in peace and robbed of it. Finally, giving it all an intent energy, it is a hybrid of the detective story and the classical quest." ---Richard Eder, Los Angeles Book Review

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description
A runaway bestseller in France, this stunning novel about love and war has been compared to War and Peace by the Los Angeles Times. Cinematic in sweep and emotional impact, the novel is both an absorbing mystery and a playful study of the different ways one story can be told.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

About the Author
Sebastien Japrisot was born in Marseille, France in 1931. He had published his first novel, Les Mal Partis when he was only 17. He has translated the works of J. D. Salinger and pursued a successful career in advertising and publicity. He has been a scriptwriter and the director of two films. His first crime novel, The 10:30 from Marseille, was received with great acclaim. His reputation as a master for crime fiction has grown with the publication of The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, A Trap for Cinderella and Rider on the Rain. His novel One Deadly Summer was made into a film starring Isabelle Adjani. A Very Long Engagement was an international bestseller and won the Prix Interallie. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SATURDAY EVENING

Once upon a time, there were five French soldiers who had gone off to war, because that's the way of the world.
The first soldier, who in his youth had been a cheerful, adventurous lad, wore around his neck an identification tag marked 2124, the number assigned to him at a recruiting office in the department of Seine. On his feet were boots taken from a dead German, boots that sank into the mud of trench after trench as he plodded through the godforsaken maze leading to the front lines.
All five of the soldiers were bound for the front. They went single file, laboring at each step, their arms tied behind their backs. The German army boots made loud sucking noises as men with guns led the prisoners from trench to trench, toward the dying light of the cold evening sky glimmering faintly beyond the dead horse and the lost cases of supplies and everything else that lay buried beneath the snow.
There was a great deal of snow. It was early January, and the year was 1917.
Number 2124 staggered along the narrow trenches, hauling himself through the mud, helped now and then by one of the guards, who would shift his gun to the other shoulder without a word and grab the prisoner's coat sleeve, tugging at the stiff cloth, helping him wrench one leg after the other from the mud.
And then the faces.
Dozens and dozens of faces, all lined up along the same side of the cramped passageways, and the eyes in these muddy faces watched as the five exhausted soldiers made their way ever closer to the front, straining forward, their bodies bent almost double with the effort. Beneath the helmets, in the evening light filtering through the mutilated trees, along the sinister earthen walls, mud-ringing eyes stared silently for a moment, all down the line, at the five passing soldiers whose arms were bound with rope.
Number 2124--nicknamed the Eskimo, also known as Bastoche--had been a carpenter, in the good old days. He dressed boards, he planed them, and in between kitchen cabinets he wet 0 his whistle at Little Louis's bar on the rue Amelot in Paris. Each morning he wrapped a long strip of flannel about his waist, for support. Around and around and around. His window opened onto slate roofs and flights of pigeons. There was a woman with black hair in his room, in his bed, who said...What did she say?
Watch out for the wire.
They advanced, bareheaded, toward the front-line trenches, these five French soldiers who had gone off to war, their arms tied with rope as sodden and stiff as their overcoats, and every once in a while, as they passed by, a voice was heard, a different one each time, a toneless, impassive voice telling them to watch out for the wire.
He was a carpenter, court-martialed for self-mutilation because they'd found powder burns on his wounded left hand. They'd condemned him to death for something he hadn't done. He's been trying to pull a white hair from his head. The gun, which wasn't even his, had gone off all by itself, because for a long time now, from the sea in the north to the mountains in the east, these man-made labyrinths had been the playground of the devil. He never did manage to pull out the white hair.
In 1915, he's been awarded some money and mentioned in dispatches for taking a few prisoners. Three. In the Champagne region. The first one had raised his empty hands overhead, he had a lock of blond hair falling over one eye, he was twenty years old and spoke French. He said...What did he say?
Watch out for the wire.
The other two had stayed with a dying comrade just breathing his last, his belly ripped open by who knows what. Flashes of artillery fire, flashes of sunlight, flashes. Beneath a half-burned cart, crawling along on their elbows, still wearing their gray forage caps edged with red, a sunny day, a good day to surrender. Where was that? Somewhere or other, at the tail end of the summer of '15. One time he'd gotten off a train in a village and there'd been a dog barking on the platform, barking at the soldiers.
Number 2124 was hale, robust, with the strong shoulders of an active man who'd gaily set off in his youth for adventure in America. The shoulders of a logger, a carter, a prospector, shoulders so broad they made the rest of him seem smaller. He was now thirty-seven years old, almost to the day. He believed everything they'd told him to justify his madness, all those reasons lying shrouded in the snow. He'd taken the boots from an enemy soldier who no longer needed them, he'd taken them to wear on those cold nights on sentry duty, to replace his old shoes stuffed with straw or newspaper. They'd tried him in a schoolhouse, convicted him of self-mutilation, and he'd been in trouble once before, unfortunately, because he'd been drinking and had done something stupid with a few pals, but that business about the mutilation, it wasn't true. He'd received a commendation, he'd been doing his best like everyone else, he simply couldn't figure out what was happening to him anymore. Since he was the oldest, he was the first prisoner in line, slogging through the flooded trenches, his broad shoulders bent forward, watched by those mud-ringed eyes.
The second man's number was 4077, issued at a different recruiting office in the department of the Seine. He still wore the tag bearing his number beneath his shirt, but everything else, all badges and insignia, even the pockets of his jacket and overcoat, had been torn off, as they had been from his companions' clothing. He had slipped while entering the trenches and been soaked through, chilled to the bone, but perhaps this was a blessing in disguise, for the cold had numbed the pain in his left arm, pain that had kept him from sleeping for several days. The cold had also dulled his mind, which had grown sluggish with fear; he could not even imagine what their destination might be, and longed only for an end to his bad dream.
Before the nightmare he'd been a corporal, because they'd needed one and the fellows in his platoon had chosen him, but he hated military ranks. He was certain that one day all men, including welders, would be free and equal among themselves. He was a welder in Bagneux, near Paris, with a wife, two daughters, and marvelous phrases in his head, phrases learned by heart, that spoke of the workingman throughout the world, that said...For more than thirty years he'd known perfectly well what they said, and his father, who'd so often told him about the Paris Commune, had know this, too.
It was in their blood. His father had had it from his father, and had passed it on to his son, who had always known that the poor manufacture the engines of their own destruction, but it's the rich who sell them. He'd tried to talk about this in the billets, in the barns, in the village cafés, when the proprietress lights the kerosene lamps and the policeman pleads with you to go home, you're all good folks, so let's be reasonable now, it's time to go home. He wasn't a good speaker, he didn't explain things well. And they lived in such destitution, these poor people, and the light in their eyes was so dimmed by alcohol, the boon companion of poverty, that he'd felt even more helpless to reach them.
A few days before Christmas, as he was going up the line, he'd heard a rumor about what some soldiers had done. So he'd loaded his gun and shot himself in the left hand, quickly, without looking, without giving himself time to think about it, simply to be with them. In that classroom where they'd sentenced him, there had been twenty-eight men who'd all done the same thing. He was glad, yes, glad and almost proud that there had been twenty-eight of them. Even if he would never live to see it, since the sun was setting for the last time, he knew that a day would come when the French, the Germans, the Russians--"and even the clergy"--would refuse to fight, ever again, for anything. Well, that's what he believed. He had those very pale blue eyes flecked with tiny red dots that welders sometimes have.
The third man was from the Dordogne and his number was 1818. When they'd assigned it to him, he'd nodded slowly while a strange feeling had come over him, because he'd been a ward of the Child Warfare Bureau, and in every center to which he'd been sent as a boy, his cubbyhole in the refectory or dormitory had always been number 18. Ever since he had learned how to walk, he had done so with a heavy step, now made even heavier by the mud of the war. Everything about him was heavy and patient and obstinate. He'd done it, too; he'd loaded his gun and shot himself in the hand--the right one, as he was left-handed--but without closing his eyes. On the contrary, his outlook on the whole affair had been circumspect, withdrawn, unfathomable, for his vantage point was that of solitude, and number 1818 had been waging his own war for a long time now, all alone.
Watch out for the wire.
Number 1818 was without a doubt the bravest and most dangerous of the five soldiers. During his thirty months in the army, he'd given no one cause to speak of him, he'd told no one anything at all about himself. They had come out to his farm to get him one August morning, they had put him on a train, and as far as he knew, it was up to him to stay alive if he ever wanted to go home again. Once, he'd strangled an officer in his company. It was by the Woëvre, during an offensive. No one had seen him. He'd pinned the man down with a knee to the chest and strangled him. He'd grabbed his gun and run off, bent low beneath the fireworks overhead, and that had been the end of it.
His wife had been a foundling, too, and now that he was far from her side, he remembered the softness of her skin. It was like a tear in the fabric of his sleep. And he often recalled the perspiration pearling on her skin, after she had worked all day long with him, and her poor 0hands. His wife's hands were cracked and hard as those of any man. They'd hired up to three day laborers at the same time, and there was more than enough work for the lot of them on the farm, but all the men, everywhere, had been sent away to the war, and his wife had ... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From AudioFile
A French soldier tells Mathilde Donnay a story from the front: Her fiancé, who was reported killed in the line of duty, may have been court-martialed, then thrown over the bunker into "no man's land" while awaiting official punishment. Maggi-Meg Reed makes this story a personal one; listeners will feel all of Mathilde's sorrow, anger, and determination as she hears the official denials and seeks the truth--and her fiancé, who may be alive. Reed's narration, filled with the passion that comes with conviction, will keep listeners riveted throughout this novel of French life just after WWI. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
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