Emmanuel Bove

Brave, bold, and brilliant, Larsen's autobiographical portrait of a biracial woman's quest for self-identity and acceptance offers a cautionary tale of an individual lost between two cultures.

Night departure relates the escape of a band of French soldiers following the murder of two German guards at a prisoner-of-war camp, and their ensuing journey, on foot and unarmed, to their native land. It is a powerfully antiheroic tale in which the escaped prisoners' irrational devotion to one another is offset by acts of petty betrayal and violence. Paranoia and hopelessness propel them along their way as often as does the desire to be free. Their leader, who is also the book's narrator, finds himself despised and mistrusted. In No Place, the same selfless and comical narrator is beaten down by the bureaucratic stupor of occupied France - more than he had been by his earlier imprisonment and escape. Freedom remains elsewhere. Little by little, Bove's hero is transformed into a vaguely odious parasite, his sense of grandeur overshadowed by a simple fear of dying.

Maurice Lesca, the sour hero of A Man Who Knows, is fifty-seven - older than Bove's other protagonists, not much wiser, no less painfully comical in his failures and confusions. Though he is well educated, financial and amorous miscalculations have leveled him. A failed doctor, he lives in poverty with his widowed sister, whom he sees only at mealtime. Kept afloat by odd handouts from family and connections, Lesca also milks his remaining acquaintances. When he starts visiting a divorcee who runs a dim little bookshop and encourages her to extort more money from her ex-husband, he begins to sow the seeds of dissatisfaction and distrust that will infect his world. But Lesca is a survivor, he will always survive in the modern city. A Man Who Knows was written in 1942 but not published in France until 1985. It is the last of Bove's major novels and the most mature example of his characteristic method.

Emmanuel Bove was born in 1898 and died in 1945. From the first he wished to be a writer - wished to be that and nothing else -; and he succeeded in being otherwise invisible, in having no other existence. When questioned by those who were curious about the man behind the twenty or so books, Bove would demur of himself he deemed best to say nothing at all for "How would one be able to resist the pleasure of filling one's biography with events, with paltry thoughts, with wanting to write from the age of eight, with a misunderstood childhood... The wisest, I'd say, is not to get started." . In A Singular Man, Jean-Marie Thely, the quintessential Bovian narrator, cannot stop. In a state of permanent tension, of unrelieved moral gridlock, this anguished bystander, posted on the outskirts of polite society, has founded the whole of his existence upon the idea that he is unlike others. He derives his "singularity" from his origins: he was born an illegitimate child. As an adult he is refused acceptance into those very middle-class mileux upon whose charity he survived from infancy on. Thely struggles to overcome his stigma, is thwarted at every turn. Barred from anything better than an ordinary education, barred from an officer's career in the army, he sours early, a wounded man who cannot but wound others he meets upon his path. . And yet, reading these "memoirs," one comes by and by to feel that this portrait is not what it purports to be, that this eternal outsider is just as certainly the representation of a man who typifies his times and the estrangements that add up to a common denominator in a world where, be it with or be it without the beguilings that money provides, everyone without exception lies firmly in the embrace of loneliness and alienation.

"Victor Baton is a wounded war veteran trying to reestablish his prewar lifestyle but avoid work. Living in a run-down boardinghouse, Baton spends his days searching Paris for the modest comforts of warmth, cheap meals, and friendship, but he finds little. Despite his desperate situation, Baton remains vain and unsympathetic, a Bovian antihero to the core. Bove himself called My Friends, published in France in 1923, a "novel of impoverished solitude.""--BOOK JACKET.

On one level, The Stepson is the tale of a young man's infatuation with his stepmother, a well-placed bourgeoise with painterly ambitions, of that young man's replication of his father's life (low-class affair, illegitimate son, marriage); and of his own successive marriages and affairs, none of which work. At a much deeper level, it is a study of what Russians call (after Goncharov's novel) oblomovschina, the paralysis of the will. Jean-Noel, the stepson in question, is a nullity with ambitions as long as he needn't do anything to advance them. He doesn't act, he undergoes. It is the intricate, tortuously rationalized play of his passivity before fate (an awful biological mother, a dreadful, deprived younger brother; young women, on an ascending social scale, who want to fill his void) that makes this one of Bove's most fascinating novels, a sort of tragic bedroom farce. . Bove is the Proust of the lower orders, of the defeated, of collective anonymity; he is all circumstance, context, distance. His style is a form of hyper-objectivity; his world bathes in a light where events always just fail to be understood. We should be grateful that forty years after the oblivion into which he fell after 1945 we have recovered a novelist whose work so perfectly incarnates the underside of French life between the wars, and who is now recognized as one of the key French writers of this century.

Paris in the 1930s: Louis Grandeville has a beautiful wife, a nice home, a loyal servant, and a large circle of well-placed friends. His financial situation doesn't require him to work. Yet Louis is obsessed by the nagging reality that he never has and never will amount to anything. He believes his life is devoid of any affection, of any goal, filled instead with a thousand trifles intended to relieve its monotony, populated with human beings he seeks out to avoid being alone but for whom he cares little. The "Winter" of the title is in fact a period of four months during which, every few days, Louis commits to paper the minute details of his unhappy marriage. Although his wife, Madeleine, is the focal point of his journal, and his preoccupation with the minutiae of her life, mind, and body is dangerously obsessive, his painstakingly rendered analyses of her behavior tell us far more about him than about her, and about the harm two people can do to each other. In its exploration of one of the riskiest of all human transactions - a stable relationship between two people of the opposite sex - A Winter's Journal is one of the most unsparing novels ever written on the self-destructive impulse present in all marriages.