The Verdun Affair
Page 28
13. After the riot in Bologna, Tom and Sarah find a group of boys whipping a cadaver with their belts (p. 257). What symbolic value does this action have?
14. The song Tom hears a soldier sing in Aix-les-Bains—the song he tells Sarah that Lee Hagen sang—ends with, “the perfect end to a perfect year.” How do the lyrics reflect the situation in Europe in 1921, as well as the three main characters’ experiences?
15. What do you make of Dr. Bianchi’s final treatment with Douglas Fairbanks? Why are Paul, Sarah, and Tom willing to see Douglas Fairbanks suffer?
16. At the very end of The Verdun Affair, with the glimmer of a new life before him, Tom remembers what it was like to drive an ambulance in combat during World War I (p. 291). Can you imagine why that image might come to him at that time?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Further research World War I by reading one of the books the author mentions inhis acknowledgments, such as A World Undone by G. J. Meyer or The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne.
2. Check out Nick Dybek’s first novel, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Thank you to the libraries—university and public—and to the bookstores—used and new—in Seattle, Washington; New York, New York; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Corvallis, Oregon. Many books were integral to the writing of this one, some found completely by chance.
I owe a great debt to historical context and detail found in The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne; The Discovery of France and Parisians by Graham Robb; The Vertigo Years by Philipp Blom; Mussolini’s Italy by R. J. B. Bosworth; City of Nets by Otto Friedrich; The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell; Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins; Constellation of Genius by Kevin Jackson; The Golden West by Daniel Fuchs; The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig; A Nervous Splendor by Frederic Morton; A World Undone by G. J. Meyer; No Man’s Land by Eric J. Leed; and The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund.
I am particularly indebted to Pál Kelemen’s beautifully written Hussar’s Picture Book, which inspired the stories that Paul Weyerhauser tells about Ilona and the requisitioned house in Russian Poland. A passage in Mark Thompson’s wonderful history of the Italian Front, The White War, serves as the basis for Paul’s description of the explosion on Mount Tofana. Bianchi’s story about Giuseppe Anglani is based on an account found in Vincenzo D’Aquila’s strange and fascinating memoir, Bodyguard Unseen. The real-life details of Anthelme Mangin can be found in Jean-Yves Le Naour’s intensely moving The Living Unknown Soldier. Father Gaillard’s technique of touching the cold noses is based on the method of a British Chaplain, Cyril Horsley-Smith, a detail found in Emily Mayhew’s vivid and incisive Wounded. The story Father Perrin tells Tom about the faceless soldier in the hospital at Rouen is based on a French nurse’s account I encountered at an exhibition in the Douaumont Ossuary. The letters of Avery Royce Wolfe (compiled and edited by William and Eric Harvey as Letters from Verdun) were an invaluable resource for bolstering my understanding of life as an American ambulance driver at Verdun.
Thanks to the College of Liberal Arts and the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University for crucial support. Thanks to Valerie Steiker, Nan Graham, Sally Howe, Rosie Mahorter, and everyone at Scribner. Thanks to Julie Barer and everyone at the Book Group. Thanks to Peter Bognanni and Brad Liening. Thanks to Tom Dybek. Thanks to my parents. Most of all, thanks to Madeline.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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© MELISSA BLACKALL
NICK DYBEK has been a Granta New Voice, a Michener–Copernicus Society of America Fellow, and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his first novel, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, was translated into five languages. He teaches at Oregon State University and lives in western Oregon with his family.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Nick Dybek
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First Scribner hardcover edition June 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dybek, Nick, author.
Title: The Verdun Affair : a Novel / by Nick Dybek.
Description: New York : Scribner, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017061760| ISBN 9781501191763 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501191770 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Amnesia—Fiction. | CYAC: Verdun (France)—Fiction. |
BISAC:
FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION /
Literary. |
GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3604.Y27 V47 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061760
ISBN 978-1-5011-9176-3
ISBN 978-1-5011-9178-7 (ebook)