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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   375 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

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Regardless of what one makes of its politics, is The Camp of the Saints any good? Is it an entertaining read?

Unfortunately I think Jean Raspail badly needed an editor willing to make severe cuts. I found the prose a bit stilted at times, which I can only partly ascribe to a loss in translation. That said there are a few truly elegant lines which shine through, one of which is the one you've seen if you've heard of the book:

They know nothing about what you are, about what you represent. Your world means nothing to them. They won’t try to understand. They’ll be tired. They’ll be cold. They’ll build a fire with your lovely oak door.

Unfortunately the author did not have the sense to end the speech there and it keeps going on.

They’ll shit all over your terrace and wipe their hands on the books in your library. They’ll spit out your wine. They’ll eat with their hands from the pretty pewterware I see on your wall. Sitting on their haunches, they’ll watch as your armchairs go up in flames. They’ll use your embroidered sheets to play dress up. Every object will lose the meaning you attach to it. What’s beautiful won’t be beautiful anymore. What’s useful will become laughable. And what’s useless will become absurd. Nothing will have any real value anymore, except maybe that bit of string left in a corner that they’ll fight over, breaking everything around them. Who knows? Now get lost!

Then there is this rather long soliloquy while the speaker holds a man at gunpoint.

You? Why, you’re not my kind. You’re the opposite of me. I don’t want to spoil this crucial night in the company of my opposite. So, I’m going to kill you.

You wouldn’t know how. I’m sure you’ve never killed anyone.

That is correct. I’ve always lived the peaceful life of a professor of literature, one who loved his profession. No war has ever required my services and I’m sickened by what appears to be useless killing. I would have probably made for a poor soldier. Like Aetius, however, I believe I would have joyfully killed the Hun. And, like Charles Martel, hacking away at Arab flesh would have filled me with enthusiasm, just like it did Godfrey of Bouillon and Baudoin the Leper King. There I would be, lying dead under the walls of Byzantium next to Constantine Dragases, but by God would I have slaughtered my share of Turks first! And when a man is sure of his cause, he does not die so easily! There I am, back to life, carving up Slavs with the Teutonic Knights. And there, leaving Rhodes with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and his peerless little troop, a white cross emblazoned on my cloak and a bloody sword in my hand. A sailor under John of Austria, I avenge myself at Lepanto. What a slaughter! But then there’s no longer any use for me. Just a few trifles that contemporary history – that sad joke! – has begun to misjudge, already I don’t remember them very well. It’s all become so ugly: no more fanfares, no more standards, no more Te Deum. Forgive the pedantic babbling of an old academic. I obviously haven’t killed anyone, but all these battles, I feel as one with them in the depths of my soul, I’m reliving them all at once, their sole protagonist, with a single shot. Here!

On the other hand of course, had this simply been presented as the internal monologue of the speaker, rather than his actual spoken words, I would have had no quibbles so perhaps it's merely my own sense of timing that objects. Now that I think about it, had this been presented as the internal monologue I think I would have found it much more compelling.

Also there's a mention of a Soviet Model 1937 revolver at one point which irked me because there was no such Soviet model. There was a S&W Model 1937 revolver produced for Brazil, but the Soviets stopped making new models of military revolver with the M1895 Nagant. Now it could of course have been a 1937 produced M1895, but the word was model not manufacture. I fully recognize this is just my own personal gun autism objecting but still.

Unfortunately, I think Jean Raspail badly needed an editor willing to make severe cuts. I found the prose a bit stilted at times, which I can only partly ascribe to a loss in translation.

If you're reading the old pirated version, note that a new translation was published, based on a later edition of Raspail's original text. (It recently caused a stir when Amazon temporarily removed its print version from sale.) Here are the first and last paragraphs of its "Note on the Translation".

This translation is based on the final, 2011 edition of Le Camp des Saints and differs in important respects from its predecessor, Norman Shapiro's 1975 translation for Charles Scribner's and Sons. Between the first and third editions of the novel (1973 and 1985, respectively), Jean Raspail revised his text in ways both large and small. Many of these revisions were of an "editorial" nature: the elimination of passages of unnecessary or redundant characterization, a greater willingness to forgo lengthy development and leave matters already suggested to the imagination, the suppression of some asides particularly likely to draw the censor's ire, and so on.

Finally, the two translations differ in point of the temperament of their respective translators. Shapiro, who died in 2020, was a brilliant and accomplished translator of Belle Époque theater and poetry and a master of the inspired paraphrase. This latter trait, elsewhere a virtue, sometimes led him to improvise in ways that are not, in my view, authorized by the source. I [Ethan Rundell] have preferred a more sober approach, attempting as far as possible to render Raspail in English as he would have written in that language himself. It is his voice, I hope, that will prevail, not mine.

No that's the version I have, I bought it rather than pirate it.

I feel like if I read it on release, it would have been an incredibly controversial mindfuck of a read. These days? Not so much.

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