Author: Armand Idrac

ISBN: 0-9743158-5-0

The following Review was contributed by by Kathryn Atwood:

            Armand Idrac’s Memoirs From Normandy: Childhood, War and Life’s Adventures is appealing on many levels.  It first caught my eye because of my intense interest in World War II history; the prospect of reading a French child’s perspective of the Normandy invasion was too much to resist.  The chapter covering the invasion doesn’t disappoint.  The particulars of one of the greatest military invasions of all history as seen through the eyes of a 15 year-old boy – the evacuation, the growing deprivations of the populace, local ambivalence towards the occasional humaneness of the German soldiers, the thunder of Allied bombs, a line of British tanks parked in the middle of the road during a makeshift, roadside tea-time – make this chapter immensely compelling.

            The central appeal of this book, though, lies in Idrac’s attention to detail.  The first few chapters are peppered with the colorful characters who peopled Idrac’s childhood, many of them veterans of the first world war.  He remembers so many striking details that I had to smile when I read his disclaimer at the end of his childhood descriptions: “With time my childhood memories have also curiously broken off.  Certain ones live in my memory as clear as if I were seeing them, others are obscured as though in the fog of a dirty glass, and then there are all the others, like shards of shattered glass, of which no memories remain.”  This, from a memoirist who remembers no less than the exact moment his grandmother would add croutons to her vegetable soup, the beautiful mustache of the old man who sold milk from his horse-cart, and who provides a precise description of an old paddlewheel boat that ferried his aunt to her annual vacation. 

            I admit to feeling an initial let-down after the D-Day invasion chapter.  It took me a chapter or two more to appreciate that Idrac’s purpose in writing the book was not so much to chronicle the Normandy landing (that chapter was actually an afterthought), but to illustrate many charming and humorous everyday occurrences, seen through the eyes of an extremely observant individual.  Nothing is beyond Idrac’s attention or witty observation: everything from the ups and downs of office politics (his day job was in the administration offices of the Railways) to the steam from his beloved Italian volcanoes (his passionate hobby was climbing and observing them) is mentioned in great and humorous detail.  He also includes many funny human interest stories told him by others, which he relates, of course, in precise particulars.

            I had an initially difficult time with the book’s syntax; it seems to have been translated straight out of the French, often with seemingly little effort at Anglicizing the writing.  It didn’t take me long to get used to it though, and in a way, it helped me remember that I was reading a translation.  It also helped me, a chronic speed reader, to slow down and savor every word.

            A very enjoyable book.