Holy Week deals, in some 270,000 words, with one of the most stirring episodes in French history…. And what does M. Aragon make of it? One of the dullest chronicles that ever came from the pen of a poet—which is saying much. Poets, used to the exactions of verse, imagine prose to be easy. Holy Week reads as if it had been compiled by a committee of fact-finders and translated by an electronic computer. The author not only indulges in a ponderous style, he seems unable to select his materials and gives no sort of life to his characters….

[The] lifeless monster is pushed and shoved along. Every collected detail, from the shape of a buckle to the name of every citizen who ever signed a deposition, is somehow shoehorned into the mash. No doubt the author seriously intends to recreate a period, but the effect is as...