Emmanuel Bove

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."

My Friends

Originally published: Paris: Emile-Paul, 1928.

Henri Duchemin and His Shadows

Janet Louth

Nathalie Favre-Gilly

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.

A Winter's Journal

A Armadilha

After the fall of France, colorless Joseph Bridet determines to go to Vichy and ingratiate himself with the regime there as a first step towards escaping to England, only to discover that he is in agreement with the suspicious and pitiless world of the Petainists, where everyone is as mediocre and contemptible as he is

Quicksand

Von Rilke bewundert, von Beckett empfohlen, von Handke übersetzt: 1921 schrieb Emmanuel Bove, dreiundzwanzigjährig, seinen ersten Roman Meine Freunde, dem die begeisterte Colette zur Publikation verhalf. Drei Jahre später erschien Boves zweiter Roman Armand. Armand erscheint zunächst als ein glücklicher Zwillingsbruder jenes Victor Baton aus Meine Freunde, der vergeblich auf der Suche nach anderen Menschen war, mit denen er endlich glücklich sein könnte: Armand hat jemanden gefunden, eine Frau namens Jeanne, die ihn liebt und ihm sogar ein gewisses Wohlleben ermöglicht. Dann aber begegnet ihm eines Tages auf der Straße Lucien, ein Kumpan von früher, aus der Zeit der Armut und der Verlassenheit, und wenig später Marguerite, die Schwester Luciens, und es beginnt die Geschichte eines haarsträubenden Verhängnisses.

Roman

Armand

Os Meus Amigos

Mes amis, roman

Diario escrito en invierno

Arkadaslarim

Fiction. Translated from the French by Mitchell Abidor. Introduction by Brian Evenson. A RASKOLNIKOFF was originally commissioned for a series of novels called "The Great Fable: Chronicle of Imaginary Characters," in which figures from literature, theater, film, and legend were brought back to life. Other writers chose Merlin, and Chaplin's Tr& Bove's choice was to write "a continuation of Crime and Punishment." In a letter to his publisher he said that Raskolnikoff "doesn't appear in flesh and blood, but his influence on the young man's spirit is very visible." "The novella A RASKOLNIKOFF operates (as the title suggests) in a Dostoyevskian vein, with nods to both Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground. It also strikes me as being a response of sorts to Arthur Schnitzler's novella Dying (1895), which offers a similar torturous dynamic between the two main characters. A RASKOLNIKOFF is the story of Changarnier, a lonely, impoverished man with a healthy perhaps too healthy sense of his own guilt and an overweening sense of pride. He has as his audience Violette, a girl who adores him and who he treats increasingly erratically. Together, exhausted, they wander the streets of Paris, eventually "walking straight ahead in the hopes that something will happen to us." Brian Evenson, from the Introduction"

A Raskolnikoff

Emmanuel Bove's Armand follows the sensitive title character and the people in his orbit over the course of a day. There is Jeanne, Armand's wealthy lover and keeper; his awkward and penniless old friend Lucien; and Lucien's younger sister Marguerite, who is as clumsy and poor as her brother. Bove's gift for nuance has been compared to that of Proust, and in Armand his writing is at its most powerful. From noting the way Marguerite enters a room "without pushing the door too far open, because she must have been used to slipping in and out," to interpreting the subtlety of every gesture. Bove manages to plumb the emotional depths of his characters through exacting observation of their finely textured surfaces.

Mis amigos

roman

Le meurtre de Suzy Pommier

Moji prijatelji

Jean-Luc Bitton

Mes amis, Armand, Bécon-les-Bruyères, Un soir chez Blutel, La Coalition, Henri Duchemin et ses ombres, Coeurs et visages, Journal écrit en hiver, Le Piège

Romans

Emmanuel Bove (1898-1945) "Pierre Neuhart se leva brusquement et se mit à arpenter son bureau. C’était une pièce assez vaste, située place Saint-Sulpice, au premier étage d’un vieil immeuble dont les appartements, privés d’eau et de gaz, avaient été aménagés en locaux commerciaux. Elle était meublée de classeurs de carton, de sièges usagés, d’une grande table couverte de paperasses, d’encriers, de règles, de pots de colle. Près de la fenêtre, un guéridon supportait une lourde et antique machine à écrire rappelant, par sa solidité et son aspect peu pratique, les premières automobiles. Un appareil téléphonique était fixé au mur, à hauteur d’homme. Quelques affiches, si mal clouées que l’on eût pu glisser le bras entre la paroi et elles, décoraient la chambre. Invité à passer la soirée chez Madame Aspi, Pierre Neuhart était agacé. En même temps qu’il regrettait d’avoir accepté, il était enchanté de se délasser un peu, de pénétrer dans un monde nouveau, de changer d’atmosphère. Avant de sortir, il décida d’en finir avec son courrier. Il le remettait toujours au dernier moment, les lettres d’affaires étant pour lui une corvée. – Simone, prenez ce que je vais vous dicter, dit-il à l’employée qui partageait son bureau. – Il est presque six heures. Je vous préviens, je m’en vais à six heures, répondit-elle. Il fallait penser plus tôt à votre courrier. – Faites ce que je vous dis. Si vous n’êtes pas contente, j’en suis désolé." Pierre Neuhart, entrepreneur tranquille dans la fleur de l'âge, rencontre Eliane, une jeune fille de 17 ans, et en tombe amoureux dingue. Mais Eliane est une jeune personne plutôt inconstante et avide. Jusqu'où cela va-t-il mener Pierre ?

L'amour de Pierre Neuhart

Ein vernünftiger Ehrgeiz hat den Architekten Jean Michelez veranlasst, sich als Bauunternehmer selbständig zu machen. Auch in seinem Gefühlsleben schließt er einen Kompromiss: Nachdem er lange Zeit auf das ideale Wesen gewartet hat und immer wieder enttäuscht wurde, zieht er nun jede beliebige Gesellschaft der Einsamkeit vor. Er lebt nach dem Grundsatz, nichts zu geben, ohne etwas zu erhalten – im Beruf wie in der Liebe. Mehr als ungelegen kommt ihm daher eine Bitte seiner Nachbarin Madame Auriol, die nach dem Tod ihres Mannes zurückgezogen und ärmlich in einem Gartenhaus lebt und sich ganz der Pflege ihrer kranken Tochter Dinah hingibt. Den Aufenthalt in der Schweiz, der nach Auskunft des Arztes das einzige Heilmittel für Dinah sein könnte, kann sich Madame Auriol nicht leisten, weshalb sie sich in ihrer Not an Michelez wendet. Dieser weigert sich zunächst, ihr zu helfen. Erst als es zu spät ist, gewinnt seine wahre Natur die Oberhand. "›Dinah‹ entpuppt sich als literarisches Kleinod." [Quelle: Jürg Altwegg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung] Zum Weiterlesen: "Emmanuel Bove. Eine Biographie" von Raymond Cousse und Jean-Luc Bitton ISBN 9783860347096

Dinah

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

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