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the complete review - history

The Name on the Wall

by
Hervé Le Tellier

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : nicely done -- and all too relevant in these times

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Ce livre se lit comme une fable sur l’absurdité de la guerre vue à hauteur d’homme. Et refait surgir le regret qu’une amnistie générale ait couvert tout cela… à peine huit ans après la Libération ! Il faudrait revisiter ce moment de 1953, quand le devoir de réconciliation a étouffé le devoir de vérité. Comme si le silence pouvait effacer la honte." - Bernard Attali, Le Journal
  
  
• "L'histoire s'écrit au fil des souvenirs ayant survécu aux anonymes, et de digressions questionnant le mythe national érigé au lendemain de la guerre afin de rétablir l'ordre et l'unité. Ce mythe qui, des décennies durant, mit en lumière les faits pouvant servir sa gloire, quitte à occulter ceux qui lui étaient inutiles. De sa plume, Le Tellier débusque le diable caché dans les détails." - Laetitia Favro, Le Point
  
  
• "Translated by Adriana Hunter, the writing is tender and precise. (...) (A) stripped-down labor of love. Indeed, it is not a novel at all, and it has been categorized as such only because of a curious dispensation afforded to the French to affix that label to any book they want. (...) The brief life that Mr. Le Tellier carefully reconstructs illuminates an era when so many ordinary people were called on to be extraordinary." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       When he bought a house in: "the heart of the hamlet La Paillette in Montjoux" Hervé Le Tellier found a name engraved on the wall of the roadside façade, long covered by a ceramic plaque which the previous owner, a ceramicist, had affixed there. The name on the wall is: André Chaix, and while Le Tellier initially doesn't think much about it, when he comes across it again on the nearby monument to "the children of Montjoux who died for France", here with Chaix's dates (May 1924-August 1944), he is more intrigued and begins to try gather information about him. Le Tellier notes: "several months went by before I saw him as the possible subject of a book", but as he learns more about Chaix: "I very soon knew I wanted to tell André Chaix's story".
       The Name on the Wall is the resulting work -- presenting what (limited) information Le Tellier can gather about Chaix within the broader context of the French Resistance, which Chaix died fighting for. In looking back to those times, Le Tellier also examines French complicity and the obscenity of Nazism -- and emphasizes the dangers of whitewashing and forgetting the crimes (and criminals) of those times.
       The Name on the Wall is a personal account, with Le Tellier writing very much from his own perspective and experiences, including the effect seeing Alain Resnais' Night and Fog had, the movie that "ejected" him from childhood at age twelve, leaving him with an "anger, fury even" that never abated and which comes through here as well.
       Le Tellier pieces together what he can of Chaix's biography and likely experiences, including how he died, along with other events and others' experiences -- some well-documented elsewhere, others personal and family accounts (including from some fellow Oulipians). He looks at Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (and Christopher Browning's earlier Ordinary Men), Ron Jones' 1967 high school experiment 'the Third Wave' (e.g.) and even Goebbel's planned Titanic-film ("intended to be a metaphor for the collapse of Great Britain. Its filming turned into a catastrophic and pitiful allegory for Nazi Germany").
       The presentation effectively hits home with its mix of Le Tellier's present-day -- i.e. at some distance -- reflection as well as accounts of the immediate horrors; the tragedy of Chaix's life -- like that of far, far too many -- cut short; and the many who went along in some form or another, on both the German and French sides, making these horrors possible. So too, in these times, does Le Tellier's insistence and reminder that there are still many who continue to support and spread much that made, all too easily, the horrors of Nazism possible, but that:

     There is no debating such ideas, there can be no polite war of words, but rather a true war waged against them. Because democracy is a conversation between civilized people; tolerance comes to an end with intolerance. Whoever sows hatred for another doesn't deserve the hospitality of discussion. Whoever wants inequality in the human race has no right to equality in the discussion.

- M.A.Orthofer, 1 October 2025

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Links:

• Other Press publicity page
• Folio publicity page
• Rowohlt publicity page
• La nave di Teseo publicity page

• Aachner Zeitung (German)
• Asymptote (scroll down for review)
• Benzine (French)
• En attendant Nadeau (French)
• Gli Amanti dei Libri (Italian)
• Der-Leser.net (German)
• Le Journal (French)
• Ma collection de livres (French)
• Marianne (French)
• Mescalina.it (Italian)
• nach Frankreich (German)
• Nonfiction (French)
• Page des libraires (French)
• Le Point (French)
• RTS (French)
• Schreiblust Leselust (German)
• Slate.fr (French)
• Sur la route de jostein (French)
• taz (German)

• Oulipo site

• The Anomaly
• All Happy Families
• Eléctrico W
• Enough about Love
• The Intervention of a Good Man
• The Sextine Chapel
• A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies)

• See Index of French literature
• See Index of Oulipo books

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About the Author:

       French author Hervé Le Tellier was born in 1957. He is a member of the Oulipo.

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© 2025 the complete review

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