The French Art of War

1991. A young man is mesmerized by the rolling coverage of Desert Storm. Forging sick notes to avoid work and feigning reasons to avoid his girlfriend, he gradually destroys his whole life. Then he meets Victorien Salagnon, an elderly artist and a veteran of countless wars. Together, they strike a bargain: Salagnon will teach the young man to paint and, in return, he wants his memoirs written down, a ranging, bloody life story of being a teenage résistant in Nazi-occupied France; of hunting rebels in Indochina and engaging in torture in Algeria; of the deaths that were as numberless as they were senseless; of the killing fields on which the modern world is built.

Alexis Jenni is a French novelist and biology teacher. His debut novel, The French Art of War, won the 2011 Prix Goncourt. Frank Wynne jointly won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with Michel Houellebecq for Atomised, and his translation of Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World won the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He is a two-time winner of the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for translation from the French and the Premio Valle-Inclán for Spanish Translation.