C'est la guerre

The novel opens with the confused perceptions of an eleven-year-old boy who, while playing in the village square, hears the tocsin sounding, then a medley of voices announcing the general mobilization. A profoundly isolated youth, he is witness to the paroxysmal events marking the Occupation in a provincial city. In a succession of hallucinatory monologues, vivid dialogues, and haunting descriptions, we see a young mind at first bewildered by adult rhetoric, and then, as it grows in understanding, made conscious of an evil without bounds. Struggling to exist, and forced to adapt to an environment evolving ever further toward corruption, violence, and baseness, the young boy discovers himself lost in a universe of black-market transactions, sordid sexual manipulations, killings, and deportations. "I am getting to know mankind, " the young narrator concludes. "Mankind is mostly shit."