The Name on the Wall
First, despite the publisher’s subtitle, this book is not a novel. Maybe it’s “creative nonfiction.” Hervé Le Tellier says: “True, I occasionally allowed my imagination to talk, but I would have found it obscene to invent….” Why “First”? Because going into this book thinking it’s a novel, as I did, diminishes the experience by confusing the reader; the misnomer would also distort this review.
Le Tellier literally found “the name on the wall” under a plaque on his house. André Chaix. Who was this? A baker’s son who joined the French Resistance and was killed by Nazis at age twenty. A young man largely forgotten today, eighty or so years after his death, as most of us will be forgotten. A handful of inscribed photographs, some letters and “fragments of collective memory” spin the thread of this young man’s life, itself interwoven with the larger history of WWII France. Despite occasional inundations of historical names, dates, and places, the book has an overall simplicity that allows us not only to imagine what André’s life was like, but to follow Le Tellier’s pursuit of a question we ask ourselves many times in many ways: how did a thing like Nazism and its brood of atrocities come to be?
Le Tellier’s remembrance of André Chaix and his milieu, read today, in these times, demonstrates a grim answer to a grim question. History has a way of lapping over its margins: the past spills into the present. Yet The Name on the Wall also offers a parallel response. Through simple valor, even a long-forgotten life can shine through the darkness. This is a good book to read.
