Henri-Pierre Roché

Based on a real-life love triangle and later made into François Truffaut's famous New Wave film, Henri-Pierre Roché's Jules et Jim is a paean to youth set in free-spirited Paris before the First World War. Jules and Jim live a carefree, bohemian existence: they write in cafés, travel when the mood takes them, and share the women they love without jealousy. Like Lucie, flawless, an abbess, and Odile, impulsive, mischievous, almost feral. But it is Kate - with a smile the two friends have determined to follow always, but capricious enough to jump in the Seine from spite - who steals their hearts most thoroughly. Henri-Pierre Roché was in his mid-seventies when he wrote this, his autobiographical debut novel. The inspiration for the legendary film directed by François Truffaut, it captures perfectly with excitement and great humour the tenderness of three people in love with each other and with life. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Patrick Evans with an introduction by Agnès C. Poirier and an afterword by François Truffaut. Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959) was born in Paris. After studying art at the Academie Julian, he became a journalist and art dealer, mixing with the avant-garde artistic set; his friends and acquaintances included the artists Michel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and in 1905 he introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso. In 1916, following his discharge from the French army, Roché went to New York and set up a Dadaist magazine, The Blind Man, with Duchamp and the artist Beatrice Wood. It wasn't until his seventies that he wrote the semi-autobiographical Jules et Jim (1953); his second novel, Les deux anglaises et le continent, was published in 1956. If you enjoyed Jules et Jim, you might like Raymond Radiguet's The Devil in the Flesh, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'A perfect hymn to love and perhaps to life'François Truffaut, director of Jules et Jim and The 400 Blows

Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man relates the story of the triangular relationship between Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roch and Beatrice Wood, told in the words of two of its protagonists; and also reprints in facsimile the Dadaist magazine they produced together in New York in 1917: The Blind Man. The principal text is the first English translation of Roch 's novel Victor, an account of his friendship with Duchamp (nicknamed Victor by his close friends in those days). Although unfinished, Roch 's text offers a unique account of New York Dada, all of whose principal characters and events make an appearance: Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, the Arensbergs and their soir es, the Blind Man's Ball and the scandal of Duchamp's "Fountain" at the Independents exhibition, a pivotal moment in modern art. The novel offers interesting insights into the sexual politics of the period, when a woman could be arrested or blackmailed for spending the night with a man to whom she was not married. Roch , a lifelong friend of Duchamp, appears to have been something of a devotee of triangular relationships, and went on to write a more famous novel on the topic (also autobiographical), Jules et Jim--later made into a film by Fran ois Truffaut. Beatrice Wood's account of these events is taken from her memoirs; she went on to become a celebrated ceramicist, dying in 1998 aged 105. The introduction and commentary is by Dawn Ades, the well-known scholar of Dada and Surrealism.

"Jules och Jim" är en berättelse om ett vänskaps- och kärleksförhållande. Året är 1907. Jules och Jim möts i Paris. De blir vänner för livet. Ibland älskar de olika kvinnor, ibland en och samma. Slutligen griper dem passionen för Kathe, den vackra, den självständiga, den gåtfulla. I början av 60-talet gjorde François Truffaut en kongenial filmatisering av Rochés bok, med Jeanne Moreau i den kvinnliga huvudrollen.

I slutet av sitt liv fullbordade Henri-Pierre Roché två romaner: \"Jules och Jim\" och \"Den långa kyssen\". \"Den långa kyssen\" är en sann historia om den stora kärleken mellan tre, två engelska systrar och en fransman. En historia som begynner strax före sekelskiftet och slutar 1927. Det är en bok om djupa känslor och deras (o)beständighet, om trohet och om möjligheten att älska fler än en. Den långa kyssen är även filmad av François Truffaut, under titeln Två systrar och Claude. Henri-Pierre Roché föddes i Paris 1879 och dog 1959.