IanETC

vintageanchor:

On Veteran’s Day, Louisa Thomas in The Daily Beast hails Geoff Dyer’s book on the First World War and how it was remembered that reveals as much about the author as the human condition. The Missing of the Somme is a book on war unlike any other…

“In the early ’90s Geoff Dyer moved to Paris to write a novel modeled on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. Instead he wrote a strange little book about the First World War, The Missing of the Somme, which has just been published in the United States. The Missing of the Somme has long been a curio to American fans of Dyer, and its publication in the U.S. now, 17 years after its publication in the U.K., reflects his growing stature (he was also recently given a column in the New York Times Book Review). Only the most curious thing about it turns out to be how serious it is—not only in its attempts to grapple with the memorialization of the First World War in Europe (in the U.S., that war is nearly forgotten), but in understanding the otherwise of Dyer’s human condition. He writes about memory, he writes about seeing, he writes about sex and distraction and idleness—but only after reading The Missing of the Somme did it occur to me how often, and how much, he’s actually writing about war…”

Read more here.