'tormented by the thought that he'd never had a chance to read a certain 75-year-old novel'

"What novel could be so essential that even the dead feel compelled to know what it's about? At the beginning of Jean Giraudoux's 1926 novel ''Bella,'' the narrator, attending a memorial service for schoolmates who fell in the trenches of World War I, begins to hear the voices of his dead comrades. For the most part, they talk about mundane, soldierly things: the discomforts of war, annoying commanding officers. But the last voice the narrator hears is different -- it's the voice of a young man tormented by the thought that he'd never had a chance to read a certain 75-year-old novel. What the dead youth wants is for the narrator to summarize the book ''in a word.'' In a word, because ''with the dead, there are no sentences.''
daqui.