Emmanuel Bove

Bove's tale of a World War I veteran living in postwar Paris, searching for friendship and warmth, is an ironic, entertaining masterpiece by one of France's favorite authors. Emmanuel Bove was discovered by Colette in the 1923, and other admirers of his work include Samuel Beckett, Wim Wenders, and John Ashbery. My Friends is Bove's first and most famous book, and it begins simply, although unusually, enough: "When I wake up, my mouth is open. My teeth are furry: it would be better to brush them in the evening, but I am never brave enough." Victor Baton is speaking, and he is a classic little man, of no talent or distinction or importance and with no illusions that he has any of those things, either; in fact, if he is exceptional, it is that life's most basic transactions seem to confound him more than they do the rest of us. All Victor wants is to be loved, all he wants is a friend, and as he strays through the streets of Paris in search of them we laugh both at Victor's meekness and his odd pride, but we feel with him, too. Victor is after all a kind of everyman, the indomitable knight of human fragility. And, in spite of everything, he, or at least his creator, is some kind of genius, investing the backstreets and rented rooms of the city and the unsorted moments of daily life with a weird and unforgettable clarity.

Ranskalaisen kirjailijan Emmanuel Boven romaani Hämäys (Le Piege) on Kaila Holman tuore suomennos. Se edustaa kirjailijan myöhäistuotantoa, joka julkaistiin vasta tämän kuoleman jälkeen. Saksan miehitettyä Ranskan Ukrainan juutalaista taustaa oleva Bove onnistui pakenemaan Pohjois-Afrikkaan, Algeriin, vuonna 1942. Romaani Hämäys syntyi näiden pakolaisvuosien aikana ja kertoo tarinan Joseph Bridet'stä, joka etsii paikkaansa miehitetyssä maassa ja suunnittelee pakoa niin Marokkoon kuin Lontooseen. Hämäys on vaikuttava kuvaus kriisiajan epätietoisuudesta ja vainoharhaisuudesta. Emmanuel Bove itse ehti kokea miehitysajan päättymisen ja palasi Pariisiin, mutta maanpaon rasitusten tuloksena hän menehtyi heinäkuussa 1945.

Par une douce soir e d'hiver, Andr Poitou s'achemina pas lents vers l'h tel Gallia. De nombreux consommateurs taient attabl s la terrasse des caf s. Ils apercevaient, travers un brouillard jaun tre et mobile, les arbres d nud s du boule-vard, les lumi res tremblantes des enseignes et cette foule o m me le promeneur aux v tements clairs passe inaper u. Les f tes de No l approchaient. Derri re les vitres embu es des restaurants, aux tringles des rideaux, non de dentelle innocente mais de velours, pendaient des pancartes de carton glac sur lesquelles les patrons vantaient, en caract res d'imprimerie, les avantages de leur r veillon. Andr Poitou avait voulu se rendre seul l'h tel Gallia o ses parents et amis avaient organis , ce soir-l , un banquet pour f ter sa r cente nomination dans l'ordre de la L gion d'honneur. Mais cela n'avait pas t sans mal qu'il s' tait d barrass de son fr re Maurice qui, depuis plusieurs jours d j , souhaitait de faire une sorte d'entr e triomphale dans la salle du banquet au c t du nouveau l gionnaire...

Arriv en France, le h ros de ce roman retrouve sa famille et ses amis. Mais il remarque qu'indiff rence et hostilit . L'Occupation, jusque-l absente des romans d'Emmanuel Bove, est l'origine de ce r cit, mais elle est vite d pass e par les sentiments propres la solitude et la pers cution que ressent le h ros...

treize ans, Dinah est atteinte de tuberculose. Un s jour Leysin pourrait la sauver mais... En dernier recours, sa m re, d sargent e, s'adresse son voisin, Jean Michelez. Petit bourgeois, et riche entrepreneur qui va tre mu par Dinah...

Efter sin uppmärksammade debut med Mina vänner 1924 är Emmanuel Bove en författare i ropet, och när en serie reseskildringar från berömda franska orter planeras är det naturligt att fråga honom. Bove accepterar uppdraget, men den ort han väljer är helt renons på historiska minnesmärken, ingen katedral, inget slott, inga museer - inga sevärdheter alls. Bécon-les-Bruyères är en helt anonym förort strax väster om Paris där Bove för tillfället bodde. Ombedd att skriva om det ovanliga och särpräglade skrev han i stället om det vanliga och anonyma. I detta urval av Emmanuel Boves noveller ges läsaren ett koncentrat av den boveska världen, av utsatthet och isolering, fuktskadade hyresrum, sjaski­ga kaféer, övergivna offentliga platser, människor som föraktar varandra (och sig själva), som har överdrivna eller missriktade förhoppningar på varandra (och sig själva), människor som egentligen inte ser varandra (eller sig själva). Bove förmår dock, som få andra författare, omfatta även det mest småskurna, själviska och fula i människan med något som liknar ömhet.

An NYRB Classics Original Emmanuel Bove was one of the most original writers to come out of twentieth-century France and a popular success in his day. Discovered by Colette, who arranged for the publication of his first novel, "My Friends," Bove enjoyed a busy literary career, until the German occupation silenced him. During his lifetime, Bove's novels and stories were admired by Rainer Maria Rilke, the surrealists, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, who said of him that "more than anyone else he has an instinct for the essential detail." "Henry Duchemin and His Shadows" is the perfect introduction to Bove's world, with its cast of stubborn isolatoes who call to mind Herman Melville's Bartleby, Robert Walser's "little men," and Jean Rhys's lost women. The poet of the flophouse and the dive, the park bench and the pigeon's crumb, Bove is also a deeply empathetic writer for whom no defeat is so great as to silence desire.

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 or goal, filled instead with a thousand trifles intended to relieve its monotony, and populated with human beings he seeks out to avoid being alone but for whom he cares little. Every few days for one winter, Louis writes down the details of his unhappy marriage. Although his wife, Madeleine, is the focal point of his journal, his painstakingly rendered analyses of her behavior tell us more about him than her, and about the harm two people can do to one another. Unsparing and insightful, A Winter's Journal remains one of the most devastating novels ever written on the self-destructive impulse present in all marriages.

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.

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 withoutexception lies firmly in the embrace of loneliness and alienation.