Book description
Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the
going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade,
remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the
way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the
future's view of the past. Geoff Dyer's classic book is an original and
personal meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of
myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and
ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to,
the Great War. Articulates a response to the Great War which many
feel, but no one has analysed so scrupulously Geoff Dyer is the
author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels,
as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham
Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a
Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006
Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of
Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer
of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and
was a finalist in 1998. He lives in London.
