Impenetrable

After the tetralogy of the real world (The Bells of Basel, Les Beaux District, Les Voyageurs Imperial and Aurélien) and Communists vast fresco, Holy Week (1958) was seen as a new way from Aragon - and as a kind of new standard to the historical novel. The novel recreates the week of 1815 saw King Louis XVIII fled Paris at the announcement of the rise of the France of Napoleon - and defections from his army in favor of the usurper.
This work is, indeed, quite difficult. There are few main character, if not perhaps the painter Theodore Gericault, musketeer of the King who wonders whether it would not be more comfortable on the other side of the front. Appear a host of historical figures, the clear favorite of Aragon going to the marshals of the Empire (Mc Donald, Ney, Soult, Berthier, Marmont ...), even if the Duc de Richelieu, the former governor of Odessa and future prime minister, is entitled to a sympathetic portrait. These big names appear, disappear, are evoked digressions wire on their past or their future. All, however, are faced with the central question of the work: to maintain its fidelity to the somewhat mediocre order of the Restoration or regain the glorious but dangerous breath of the Empire? For Aragon, omnipresent narrator of the work, Holy Week is also an opportunity to paint a nation that hesitates on the way forward, a disintegrating society, elites and people fleeing their responsibilities as echoing the exodus and the 1940 debacle.
The novel is overloaded with references and should, strictly speaking, be read only if accompanied by a biographical dictionary of the Empire and the Hundred Days. You can practically count on the fingers of one hand the sentences comprising neither own name or place name. The style is admirable nor affected or sought, either by searching for the perfect music to Gracq or popular torrent to Celine, but somewhere in between (if you can conceive), he mixes People talk in free indirect style and decorated long sequences where unfolds an incredible scholarship in painting costumes and activities; he can also spend breaks poetic brutality access and offer stunning releases on the place of the novelist or the philosophy of history.
One feels a great admiration to this pyramid of knowledge and literary art, before this attempt to reconstruct an entire era and a historical moment - but, admittedly, we are bored furiously.
Fiction fans will be so for their expenses.