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Archipelago Books

The Mail Carrier

The Mail Carrier

by Roger Martin du Gard, translated from the French by Bill Johnston

$23.00
$23.00
Available as E-Book French Literature
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The Mail Carrier opens with the pink shadows of dawn and closes in the red glow of sunset’s rays. In between, a day unfolds like a crumpled missive that has fallen into the wrong hands. As Joigneau the postman sets off on his rounds, he already knows more than he lets on (he has a habit of steaming open envelopes and delivering them a day late). Each morning, Joigneau indulges in the town’s “little secrets of the moment” sorting through his stuffed sack of telegrams, letters, bills, and summonses. Unscrupulous and crafty, he keeps extra brochures in his pocket—a ready excuse to enter anyone’s home as his curiosity moves him. His roving eyes expose the often petty, circumscribed world of the villagers (and his own unsavory motives). The bakery’s fobbing off old loaves on customers. The bartender at the café-tabac is scheming to move into old mother Daigne’s envied “villa.” Pregnant women avoid the grocery, afraid of the evil eye of its proprietor sulking in the back room. What Roger Martin du Gard calls his “simple album of village sketches” renders the presumptions and concerns of the villagers in clear, light-footed prose that captures the vital rhythm of provincial life. The Mail Carrier, like the changing light that moves over the town, is a revealing and beautiful force.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770873
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

After his pointed and skeptical analysis of the human soul, which almost consumes its object with its often-extreme exactness in detail, through the most minute realism possible, Martin du Gard finally pays homage to the idealism of the human spirit.
—Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, on presentation of the Nobel Prize, December 10, 1937

Martin du Gard, in particular, was fascinated by the tension between social convention and rebellion, and between belief and disbelief . . . Roger Martin du Gard’s novels may seem rather staid and old-fashioned compared to the overpowering intellectual and emotional fluency of Proust, but they have the merit of defining a certain kind of average Frenchness—that is, bourgeois anti-bourgeoisism.
— John Weightman, New York Review of Books

Martin du Gard was not by his own account a very cheerful man; he even thought in his bluer moments that as a maker of fiction — and despite his success, which included the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature — he had come to the novel a generation too late. Fine writing wasn't his thing, objectivity was: he thought that a novelist should give us the material world — the places, people, things that fill it to overflowing — as plainly and substantively as he knew how.
—John Sturrock, The New York Times

Integrity is the word for Roger Martin du Gard . . . he is exquisitely just and painstakingly detailed . . . when Martin du Gard concentrates he approaches magnificence . . . His value lies not in the originality of his prose but in the honesty and integrity of his social viewpoint . . . you will read him with respect.
—Clifton Fadiman

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