Fin Keegan

NOW THAT Jean Rouaud has produced the final volume of what has turned out to be a quintet the time seems propitious to reconsider Fields of Glory (Les champs d’honneur, 1990) and its four successors. The author grew up in the rainy département of Loire-Atlantique (precipitation features heavily in his books). At the age of twelve he lost his father, aunt, and grand-father, all within a year of each other. Rouaud’s work, which is profoundly autobiographical, has been written out of this pain. As Proust, presiding ghost over this work of memory, pointed out: we learn only through suffering. To judge by the reaction of a teacher, in the third volume of the series, to the young narrator’s account of visiting his father’s grave–he grades him bottom of the class, a judgement delivered with sadistic ritualism before the other boys–Rouaud was not especially mollycoddled in the aftermath… Read MORE of my review of Jean Rouaud’s “Loire-Atlantique” Cycle