This is another novel by Marguerite Yourcenar and like her book Fires, which I reviewed last week or so it’s from the 1930s. I bring this up for a few reasons. For one, her book after WWII seem of a completely different flavor. The books tend to be longer, slower, and more meditative. This one is quite short — a very light 150 pages, and the narrative is much more quickly paced.
The novel about is a rich family in Germany right at the start of WWI. The lead character is too young to join the war effort and feels a keen sense of loss from not being able to go. This feels like a specific usage of dramatic irony, one that I tend not to assign dramatic irony to historical events, but it seems clear here.
We understand from the perspective of post-WWI (although in 1939 this becomes less and less clearly obvious) that joining the war is not something to be envious of, not even remotely, especially given how the ends of that war as with the upcoming war found itself trawling the young and the old for further bodies to throw into the meat grinder. Anyway, the plot then become the ways in which this kind of embittered young man takes his listlessness out on the a young woman who finds herself in his path.
This reads like a modernist version of so many short novellas written in the 1800s like First Love by Ivan Turgenv and others like it.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Coup-Grace-Marguerite-Yourcenar/dp/B0000CJTJ2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ZEPAA2HLEMCJ&keywords=coup+de+grace+yourcenar&qid=1555791068&s=gateway&sprefix=doup+de+grace%2Caps%2C227&sr=8-1)