Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

Product Information

I can see myself sitting in the sun in a nook among the sandbags and chalky debris behind the support line. It comes just near the end of the book as Sherston is thinking back to the period of time on the Western front, shortly after the death of his best friend. Keynes, in his standard bibliography of the author, states this edition was an afterthought, made when the success of the ordinary (first) edition was assured and the identity of the author known.

The deaths, horrible as they were, seemed very predictable, even as the sober descriptions allowed the horror to become something. One of the most fascinating (arguably, even modern) things about the book is that there's no knowing how to judge it.The book ends with his enlistment in a local regiment, the Sussex Yeomanry, and his subsequent transfer, with a commission, to the Flintshire Fusiliers, a battalion of the Royal Welsh which was sent to France. Just like Marcel, Siegfried's narrator George is quite capable of saying one thing and meaning another. What is certain is that, just as in Proust, all these "insignificant episodes" are steeped in irony.

With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.Could it be said that part of the reason Sassoon dug into his past, like Proust, was to make a space for the foundations of the future?