When the knackerman for books arrives in the guise of one of the uniformed recycling truck crew this Friday, I will have a few hundred books to discard. Why do I need to keep two paperback copies of Matilda, when I have a nice hardcover? Two paperback copies each of various C.S.Lewis science fiction titles that I also have in hardcover, an extra copy of St. Augustine's Confessions--you get the drift. It is nearly impossible for me to discard books, but I am biting the bullet and throwing many away. The shelves are looking better already and I feel free of acid-burned paper.
I surveyed the rejects in the basement last night and recognized that in my zest for rejuvenating the stacks some worthy books were lost in the shuffle. I retrieved Edward Dunsany's Guerrilla, and just finished rereading just before it was time to get out of bed this morning. Mine is a fine old copy, published in 1944, in cloth cover with a library binding. This particular book was discarded from a New England town library many years ago.
The publication date is interesting, because this is a story about resistance fighters in an unnamed Land in World War Two, at a time when the outcome of the war was not known. To Dunsany, however, the truth of the outcome of the war could be known because Liberty as he wrote of it is as hard as the rock of the mountains that gave their strength to a free people and could not be effaced.
I read the book as a gorgeous, long, discursive essay on beauty and time and human integrity bound to the land. There is also information about terrain of mountains and of people themselves, and quite a bit on hiding in plain sight from the attacking Stukas above and infantry below.
As Dunsany wrote in his Foreword,
The man who told this tale had got to London, after sufferings of which he never spoke. He was full of hope, a hope so firm that it induced in him almost a kind of gaiety, and certainly a fine energy. He was an uncle of the lad of whom the story chiefly tells. And the story went something like this: without details, with few names of persons or places, nor even the name of the country. Something had taught him to mention names rarely, and to believe that German ears were always listening, even in London.
But it is not the names or the places or the lesser details that are important. And I cannot be sure enough that this violent story of mine of this little fraction of the rage of a furious year will last to be read in the calm days that shall come after our war, for me to describe with any more exactitude this story, magnificent in its spirit and hope and courage.
I commend this book to you, and here is a link to Project Gutenberg, which offers the book text online.
http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/dunsany-guerrilla/dunsany-guerrilla-00-h.html
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