My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You

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L'aspect le plus prenant de ce roman concerne l'histoire de la médecine et la chirurgie reconstructrice développée aussi bien en France pour traiter les légendaires "gueules cassées" qu'en Angleterre à l'hôpital de Sidcup. The novel not only focuses on what life was like for the soldiers fighting in France, but what it was like for the women left behind.

He volunteers as a soldier at the start of World War 1 - given the choice between volunteering for a year or for the duration of the war, he chooses the latter, because he doesn't want to spend an entire year in the army. Riley is welcomed into the lives of Nadine's upper-class bohemian family and begins to better himself, sitting for paintings and developing an accent that shames and frightens his clear-eyed, pragmatic mother.

However, Nadine's mother makes it clear that Riley is not the right class for her daughter, and her objections, plus an embarrassing incident with a young artist friend, encourage a confused Riley to join up with the hopes of becoming a 'proper' man who is worthy of Nadine. I rushed through the last 200 pages so enraptured with each character with their flaws not Always predictable. My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You starts out slow-paced but picks up so much speed in the second half that I wasn’t able to put it down. Le storie intrecciate di Rose e di Julia e Peter sono indispensabili a rendere pieno un romanzo altrimenti scialbo e da leggere in spiaggia senza troppo impegno. The story frequently focuses on the emotional toll of the war, in the trenches, in the hospitals, in the homes of England.

His wife is equally repulsive, though her character raises another intriguing issue: Is being a housewife enough? I was only awarding My Dear three stars when I reached the half-way point, but it thoroughly deserved four or more by the time I read the final pages. Ooh, shame on the author for making soldiers say naughty words when mud and rats and corpses and body parts are raining down on top of them.

I tried it because it was recommended but the title made it sound like very slushy romance - it's not at all.

The three women mostly function as lenses into women’s lives at the time, and Young can’t resist a bit of authorial-standpoint posturing about feminism, the role of women and social change. Riley is adaptable and is taken in by a high class, artist, Sir Alfred, which provides the young couple access to one I was also intrigued with the psychology that young Riley uses to keep himself afloat and to see how different his reaction to the war is to Peter’s. There were parts that were beautifully written but at other times the choppiness of the narrative became hard to take. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises – but how can they when the future is not in their hands?One of the most powerful books I've read about WWI: remember the battlefield scenes in "Saving Private Ryan"? As the novel progresses, we read the letter exchanges between characters and the foreboding they hold for when the war is done and dusted. A good although not brilliant book – I preferred Atonement which had much more depth (for example this book is very much written in the third-person multi-narrator but with lots of insights into characters thoughts – the very idea Atonement challenges). I felt like you really got a good sense of who she was and her thoughts and her feelings, which made it much easier to connect with her. At times, Young's writing is stellar, particularly in her descriptions of war (from all directions - the front, the nurses, those comfortably at home, those less comfortably at home.

In the second half, Riley suffers a serious injury which will affect all of the characters in different ways. Clearly that couple were included to show a broader canvas of reactions to the war, but they didn't develop in any significant way or add much to the book. When his jaw is blown off, though, he sends her a letter telling her he loves another to spare her the pain of living with him and his disfigurement, and he enlists his own nurse’s help in convincing Nadine to go away. The first half of the story moves between the men in the trenches and the women who wait for them – Nadine, now a VAD nurse in London, Julia Locke, Peter's listless and beautiful wife bored at home in Sidcup, and Rose, Peter's saintly and unmarried sister.Having been spoiled by Good-bye To All That and All Quiet on the Western Front so far, I was a bit suspicious of this book when I first started reading it. Young's descriptions are clear and technical, and the atmosphere of the hospital is palpable, frightening, inspiring and painful. Somewhere in the middle I lost interest in the romance plot(s), and the ending was quite abrupt and a little underwhelming. Ha la delicatezza di un romanzo romantico (in senso metastorico), la forza di un romanzo di denuncia, la disperazione delle storie che raccontano la verità, la voglia di vivere che infonde chi ha vissuto la morte.