Emmanuel Bove: Mes amis (1924)

This is the cult writer Emmanuel Bove's first novel, encouraged by Colette. Mes amis is something of an ironic title, as the main character, the first person narrator Victor Bâton, who lives on a small pension following World War I, has no friends. He's not smelly or mad or anything, although he lives in a crappy appartment block whose architect didn't bother to engrave his name, where there's no bathroom, just a communal sink with a curtain where people wash themselves.

Victor is a very aware person, no doubt too aware, too sensitive, and occasional sex sessions with the barmaid Lucie Dunois, from the local café, don't quite fulfill him. But then his short attempt to find a friend in Henri Billard doesn't please him either: it seems to be more Billard's live-in girlfriend who's the problem rather than Billard himself. The fifty francs that Victor's lent the obviously richer Henri, even though Victor only gets three hundred every three months? Forget it, it's not worth thinking about.

We could continue with Neveu, the poverty-stricken sailor who wants to kill himself along with Henri, but Henri won't find friendship in a suicide pact, in fact he won't find a friend. It's a cruel life.

My other posts on Emmanuel Bove:
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Montparnasse Cemetery / Cimetière du Montparnasse
Emmanuel Bove: Le Piège (1945)
Emmanuel Bove: Cœurs et visages

Emmanuel Bove: Cœurs et visages (1928)

Emmanuel Bove (1898–1945) is a half-forgotten writer who has nevertheless become something of a cult to many readers, and his books have been re-published a number of times, such as in this example from Motifs, an imprint of Le Serpent à Plumes. The back cover calls Bove an 'Impitoyable taxidermiste des sentiments humains' (a 'pitiless taxidermist of human feelings'), which I think is an excellent way to describe this book at least (I've only read one other of his novels). Rightly or wrongly, I thought of a male, early twentieth-century Jane Austen.

I won't go on to describe the many characters in this book, I'll just leave a few of my impressions. André Poitou, a noted shoemaker with several branches in Paris and others throughout France, has just received the coveted Légion d'honneur at the age of sixty. He's worked his guts out to build himself up to such a position, seems never to have married or even have played the field, and now feels that his life is just beginning. As he approaches the Hôtel Gallia where over one hundred guests are joining him in his celebration, he anonymously pops into a bar for just one anis to steel him for the experience. He will need it.

In a relatively recent one-paragraph review, L'Express likened the scene that seems about to unfold to Buñuel's movie L'Ange exterminateur, and I confess I felt that a similar climax would occur, although it didn't, in spite of all indications pointing in that direction.

To sum the novel up in a word, this is a tale of pride and prejudice, petty vanities and long-harbored jealousies, all there around the dinner table waiting to explode in an alcoholic haze as many of the ill-chosen guests – who include André's hypocritical doctor friend who isn't a friend at all, plus his younger brother who lives off André's earnings and is a nasty piece of work all round – prepare to take their frustrations out on him. But in the end it just doesn't plan out the way things appear to be headed.

My other posts on Emmanuel Bove:
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Emmanuel Bove: Le Piège

Emmanuel Bove: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Emmanuel Bove: Mes amis

Emmanuel Bove: Cimetière du Montparnasse #8

Emmanuel Bove (1898–1945) lived a childhood of poverty and deracination which deeply affected him throughout his life, and through which he sought exorcism through writing. According to a fascinating article researched by Jean-Luc Bitton, Bove (never at home anywhere really) walked out on his wife and two children, re-married (this time to Louise Ottensouser) and was left to maintain three households: his own, his ex-wife's, and that of his mother and brother. In the years 1927 and 1928, he produced eleven novels or collections of short stories.

Interestingly, Bove, who has been described as 'an interwar novelist and painter of social and psychological misery', has had several novels translated by Peter Handke.

My first – and very long – post on the Cimetière du Montparnasse, plus a link to an earlier post I wrote on one of Bove's books:

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Montparnasse Cemetery / Cimetière du Montparnasse
Emmanuel Bove: Le Piège (1945)

Emmanuel Bove: Mes amis

Emmanuel Bove: Le Piège (1945)

Emmanuel Bove was born in 1898 and died at the age of 47 in 1945 following a long infectious illness. He published a number of novels and several selections of short stories, was praised by Colette, Samuel Beckett and Rainer Maria Rilke, but in spite of some re-publication in the 1980s remains relatively unknown even in France.

Bove refused to have any books published in occupied France, wanted to meet with de Gaulle in England, but instead ended up in Algeria. There are a few similarities between Bove and the protagonist Joseph Bridet in this novel.

Le Piège (lit. 'The Trap, but not translated) (1945) plunges the reader into a Kafkaesque nightmare world of occupied France where misunderstanding, paranoia, surveillance, and purposeless random executions are the order of the day, where no one can be trusted and the people don't know what is happening, nor why.

In Lyons, Bridet wants to leave for England but doesn't know how to, so goes to see his friend Basson in Vichy, who's an attaché with the general management of the national police. He doesn't, of course, tell him that he wants to go to England, but from Basson onwards it's all downhill, waiting for various Vichy officials who convey nothing to him other than their suspicion of him, and he knows he's in trouble.

Yolande is his naive wife with almost unbelievable confidence in the legal process, so she's certain that nothing can happen to Bridet as he hasn't done anything wrong; however, in her naivety she unwittingly makes things worse for him. On reaching Paris with a futile plan to go to England, he's arrested, communist tracts planted on him, then he's imprisoned and eventually executed.

I'm not at all certain why Bove has fallen out of favor with the reading public, although perhaps his 'subtle' and 'latent' misogyny that Alain Clerval finds — and which he speaks about in his Aferword in the 1986 Gallimard re-publication — is a contributory factor.

My other posts on Emmanuel Bove:
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Emmanuel Bove: Cœurs et visages
Emmanuel Bove: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Emmanuel Bove: Mes amis