Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

If you will not read Proust about the Dreyfus Affair because Proust is about so many other things (including finger food), your next best bet would be Roger Martin du Gard’s “Jean Barois,” which etches the ideological atmosphere in which the Affair played itself out and also the broader context of civil and religious war not just in the streets but within families too. Theatrical in construction, intellectual in substance, the novel, published in 1913, deals with conflicts of science and religion, reason and faith, in fin de siecle terms that retain their freshness and make du Gard, as Camus once called him, our perpetual contemporary. The author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937, but “Jean Barois” in English has long been out of print--perhaps because it features less sex and more thought than our age can stomach.