![]() ![]() Later, Brombert became a professor at Princeton and an authority on Flaubert and other literary figures, but first he and his parents had to make their way through the geopolitical maze that was Western Europe following the Treaty of Versailles, a transit made doubly parlous by the fact that they were Jews. As befits the era described, a gentlemanly quality prevails thus the chapter called "Erotic Fantasies" reveals less about sex and more about how, as a Paris schoolboy, Brombert learned metrics by plagiarizing the love poems of Alfred de Musset in a failed attempt to woo an older girl named Danielle Wolf. To adopt Brombert's favorite metaphor, this memoir of life in Europe before and during WWII is not a bullet train speeding toward a single thematic destination but an old-fashioned steam-powered affair prone to unexpected starts, stops and meanderings down one siding or another. Trains of Thought is a virtuosic accomplishment, and a memoir that is likely to become a classic account of both memory and experience. The final chapter concludes with Brombert's return to America, his enrollment at Yale University, and the beginning of a literary voyage whose origins are poignantly captured in this coming-of-age story. Army in 1943, and soon found himself with General Patton's old "Hell-on-Wheels" division at Omaha Beach, then in Paris at the time of its liberation, and later at the Battle of the Bulge. Discovering the excitement of New York, Brombert nonetheless hoped to return to France in an American uniform once the United States entered the war. ![]() The family was forced to flee from Paris, first to Nice, then to Spain, and finally across the Atlantic on a banana freighter to America. ![]() The invasion of May 1940 dispelled the optimistic belief, shared by most of the French nation, that the horrors that had descended on Germany could never happen to them. of being pursued by a gigantic locomotive, the nightmare of derailments, or of being trapped in a tunnel." With time, Brombert became acutely aware of the grimmer aspects of life around him-the death of his sister, Nora, on an operating table, the tragic disappearance of his boyhood love, Dany, with her infant child, and the mounting cries of "Sale Juif," or "dirty Jew," that grew from a whisper into a thundering din as the decade drew to a close. But the young Brombert sensed that "the poetry of the railroad also had its darker side, for there was the turmoil of departures, the terror. Using the train as a metaphor to describe his personal journey, Brombert recalls his boyhood enchantment with railway travel-even imagining that he had been conceived on a sleeper. In shimmering prose, Brombert evokes his upbringing in Paris's upper-middle-class 16th arrondissement, a world where "the sweetness of things" masked the class tensions and political troubles that threatened the stability of the French democracy. Army from the invasion of Normandy to the occupation of Berlin, and his discovery of his scholarly vocation. In Trains of Thought Victor Brombert recaptures the story of his youth in a Proustian reverie, recalling, with a rare combination of humor and tenderness, his childhood in France, his family's escape to America during the Vichy regime, his experiences in the U.S. Paris in the 1930s-melancholy, erotic, intensely politicized-provides the poetic beginning for this remarkable autobiography by one of America's most renowned literary scholars. "A beautifully cadenced work of art-it will remind some readers of Nabokov's classic Speak, Memory."-Joyce Carol Oates ![]()
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