Although it mainly ran Anglophone fiction, the New Review also published a number of stories in translation. This one, by the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel, I confess to knowing very little about, other than it appeared in the magazine two years after Sandel’s death, was translated by Elizabeth Rokkan and is a very fine story indeed. (I’d be grateful to anyone who can tell me more.)
The November of the title refers to November 1918, the month of the Armistice. This is not your usual war story, though. As tenants of “a splendid, but very antiquated, very ramshackle country estate” in rural Brittany, the family at its centre live well away from the fighting, only encountering it all when they offer hospitality to passing soldiers. But this is still too close for comfort. When they catch scabies from, they presume, one of their guests (“Scabies was rife in the trenches”), “at peace” is the last thing they feel when the Armistice is announced at the end of the story, and we leave our narrator abandoning the celebrations in search of a desperately needed bath. It’s a powerful metaphor for the irreparability of war.
Published in the New Review, November 1976
A Personal Anthology 