A Very Long Engagement: A Novel

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August 1919: Mathilde Donnay receives a letter from a dying man. In it, the former soldier tells her that he met her beloved fiancé, the fisherman Manech, shortly before he died. Mathilde goes to meet Sergeant Daniel Esperanza at his hospital and there hears the story of the execution. She also receives a package with a photograph of the men and copies of their last letters. As Mathilde reads and rereads the letters and goes over Esperanza's tale, she begins to suspect that perhaps the story didn't end quite so neatly. And so begins her very long investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of five condemned prisoners--one of whom, at least, might not really be dead.

In Mathilde Donnay, Sebastien Japrisot has created one of the most compelling and delightful heroines in modern fiction. Though confined to a wheelchair since childhood, "Mathilde has other lives, varied and quite beautiful ones." She paints, cares for her pets, enjoys a rich fantasy life, and is relentless in her search for the truth about Manech's death. But she is by no means the only vibrant personality leaping off Japrisot's pages. This author has a remarkable ability to draw even minor characters in three dimensions with economy and wit. Take Mathilde's mother, for instance, caught in mid-card game: "At bridge, manille, bezique, Mama is a dirty rotten swine. Not only is she an ace with the pasteboards, but she throws her opponents off their mettle by insulting or making fun of them." And even the characters we meet only through other people's memories--the condemned men--are so fully realized that you find yourself torn over which one you hope may have survived. As Mathilde comes ever closer to solving the mystery of what happened at Bingo Crépuscule that January morning in 1917, Sebastien Japrisot proves himself a master storyteller and A Very Long Engagement a near perfect novel. --Alix Wilber--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
After a court martial in January 1917, five Frenchmen convicted of self-mutilation (in order to avoid combat in WW I) are dragged along the network of zigzagging trenches to the improbably named frontline trench, "Bingo Crepuscule." What exactly happened in Bingo is as labyrinthine as the trenches themselves, but Mathilde Donnay, the fiancee of one of the soldiers, is a determined young woman whose wheelchair is unable to contain her fiercely independent and willful spirit. Aided by an indulgent, well-to-do father, a generous private investigator, soldiers who survived the conflict and the families of those who didn't, Mathilde begins the long and spotty process of re-creating events. This 1991 Prix Interallie-winner is no linear mystery: over the course of several years, Mathilde must piece together redundancies, misremembered details and deliberately obscured clues, all further mangled by the chaos of war. Mathilde is not easy to love. If she is spunky and smart, she is also spoiled, making it sometimes hard to believe that so many people stumble over themselves to help her. Still, Japrisot's ( The Sleeping Car Murders ) eloquently easy, almost offhand style (nicely translated by Coverdale) makes even throwaway lines remarkable ("Fayolle actually spoke to him, saying a few unforgettable words he can't recall at the moment"), and his re-creation of the nobility, futility and horror of trench warfare is harshly beautiful.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews
Dissatisfied with the official account of her fianc‚ Jean Etchevery's death in WW I, wheelchair-bound painter Mathilde Donnay resolves to find out the truth--with unexpectedly moving results at the end of a twisted trail. Etchevery, called ``Cornflower'' because of his youth, was one of five soldiers condemned to death for self-mutilation (shooting themselves in the hands), marched to the no-man's-land between the French and German lines, and left to die. But as Mathilde talks to the dying sergeant who was in charge of the detail and pores over the documents confirming the circumstances of the execution, telltale discrepancies (was one of the five corpses buried really wearing German boots? how explain a surviving corporal's suspicion that one or possibly two of the dead men weren't the ones he expected to see?) give her hope that Cornflower is still alive. As her researches gather more urgency, however, the years pass, survivors of the war die, memories fade, and documents disappear--leaving a trail utterly cold except for the puzzlingly contradictory stories related by the soldiers' families. Mathilde's father's lawyer urges her to give up her obsessive quest, and she finds that Germain Pire, an enterprising private detective who's urged her to hire him, has been concealing some of information he's turned up. The latest evidence suggests that a self-sacrificing corporal took the place of one of the dead--but was that one Cornflower, and if it was, why hasn't Mathilde been able to find him as late as 1924? As tricky as Japrisot's earlier bestsellers in his native France (The Passion of Women, 1990, etc.)--but also precisely, surprisingly evocative of the lingering pain of mourning and the burdens of survival. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
'Diabolically clever...The reader is alternately impressed, beguiles, frightened, bewildered...A considerable achievement' Anita Brookner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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