Pierre Boulle

Pierre Boulle wrote Bridge over the River Kwai, a book that later became a classic movie. The novel, originally in French was well-translated by Xan Fielding in 1958. It contains two spectacular bricks of language, neither of which made the movie in the inevitable exanguination that has to happen to an epic novel to make it into a 2 hour movie.

The first I print here as it appears in my 1961 time edition .. bowdlerized! The two quotes appear at nearly opposite ends of the book and really show the range of the writer and the story.

"The f---ing bridge still isn't built. the f---ing Emperors f---ing railway still hasn't got across the f---ing river in this f---ing country. The f---ing C.O.; he knows what he's talking about. If you see him, tell him we're all for him. The f---ing baboon hasn't heard the last of the f---ing British army."

"All that remained now was what the Colonel called the trimmings, which would give the construction that finished look in which the practiced eye can at once recognize, in no matter what part of the world, the craftsmanship of the European and the Anglo-Saxon sense of perfection."