Customer Reviews

A Walk with Love and Death (Hans Koning Reprint Series)

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There are very few books I've read more than once. Life is short, and the TBR pile tall. The one book I keep going back to every ten years or so is A Walk with Love and Death, by Hans Koning, a spare, elegant love story set in 1538 in France. The author was Hans Koningsberger when I first read him--it must have been the spring of 1963.

In later years, I found it difficult to find copies of the novel. This was before the Net, and finding a copy of a particular out-of-print book meant stopping in at various used bookstores and searching the shelves, one bookstore at a time. I ordered it though my small-town library, and a copy was sent to me from afar. I read it, loved it yet again, and could not bear to be parted from it. I was beginning to write myself, and Koning's spare style was something of a beacon for me.

And then, with the Net, and the all-powerful and astonishing ability to seek out any title, any author, I discovered that the book I loved was by Hans Koning, that he was a professor at a university in the U.S., and that not only was he alive and well, but had published quite a number of books. I might have written him then...but my life was busy, and so I did not.

A few weeks ago, having sent of the "final" changes to my soon-to-be-published novel, I took A Walk with Love and Death down off my shelf. It had been 44 years since I had first read it. Perhaps the author had a website, I thought. In no time, I found it, and through the contacts page, I was finally able to send him a letter, telling him how much I love this novel, and how much it has taught me about writing.

The email was bounced back. Hans Koning died this spring, only months before. It brings tears to my eyes even now. I had missed my chance.

I have just finished yet another reading of A Walk with Love and Death. I still love this book. Such beautiful sentences! I'm going to quote from the opening lines, which I think set the tone beautifully for the bitter-sweetness of the story, and the elegance of the prose:

"In the spring of that year, 1358, the peasants of northern France did not sow their fields any more.

"I had succeeded in getting out of Paris just before sunset and walked to Saint-Denis in the twilight; I had found a room there to sleep and now was on the road again.

"The sun was rising almost opposite me; a harsh light skimmed the empty fields. The war was in its twentieth year, but I was happy.


The ending: ah, I resist the obvious.

I encountered this book about the same time I encountered Pick's "The Last Valley".
Both had to do with the backwaters of long, involved wars, The Hundred Years War which inspired "A Walk with Love and Death" and the Thirty Years War which inspired "The Last Valley".
We may be familiar with some of the battles, Poitiers, for example, in the Hundred Years War, or an important figure such as Tilly or Gustavus Adolphus.
Ultimately the face of Europe changed, if we consider dynasties, maps, and so forth.
What is less known is what happens when a society whose technology does not allow for much resilience is repeatedly and horribly ruined by battles, armies marching and countermarching, unemployed mercenaries trying to make a living, plagues exacerbated by famine and exposure (homes and cities burned), bandits and brigands.
Into this perfect horror of anarchy come two young lovers. Thrown on to the road, so to speak, they attempt to survive the bandits, mercenary bands, starvation, fanatical cultists, and to find someplace of refuge.
It is possible that the author added more travails than would have normally occurred. Clearly, if one is murdered early in the book, no time is left to nearly starve, to be chased by bandits, to encounter a self-mutilating medieval version of Heaven's Gate, and be threatened by local warlords.
Both this book and "The Last Valley" were made into movies.
I encountered the movie--starring Angelica Huston and Assaf Dayan--when I was at Ft. Jackson in 1970
Ordinarily, the best lines in movies in post theaters are supplied by the audience, and are uniformly hilarious. Movies are far more entertaining seen this way.
This movie played to absolute silence.
When I got out of the movie, and the rest of the usually irrepressible and vigorous Infantrymen were walking out silently, I stopped to look at the sunset, taking deep breaths.
The street past the theater was a long, shallow grade. As I watched, a big tactical deuce and a half came up the street, snarling in low gear, carrying the guard reliefs.
"Thank God," I thought, "somebody's in charge."

When nobody's in charge, the peasants eventually cease planting, defying culture, history, and possibly even their genes. The saga of the archers at Poitiers, or the Swiss mercenaries trailing their pikes back and forth across Europe cover the absolute horror the wars caused. This is a book to remind us of what we don't see, in Europe or the Americas at this point. Although certain areas of Africa may well look similar.

The book is a riveting read, although depressing. I wouldn't read it before a family function, nor before bed.

It's an easy read, a simple tale of love in the Middle Ages. A poor man falls for an aristocrat woman and they must escape her demolished home.