My Friends

Literature & Fiction

Bove, Emmanuel

Louth, Janet [Translator]

Literary

Carcanet

A Singular Man

Marlboro Press

A Winter's Journal

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 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.

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.

Armand

Contemporary

Maurice Lesca is fifty-seven--older, not much wiser, and painfully comical in his failures. Though educated as a doctor, he's a ne'er-do-well who milks family and friends for money and lives in poverty with his widowed sister. When he encourages a divorcée to extort money from her ex-husband, Lesca sows the seeds of distrust that will disrupt his world. But Lesca is a survivor; he will always survive in the modern city. The last of Bove's major novels, A Man Who Knows is the most mature example of his celebrated style.

A Man Who Knows

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."

Armand, now living with a woman of means, is reminded of his recent poverty by an unexpected visit from Lucien, an old friend.

Louth, Janet

Carcanet Press Ltd.

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.” The book, his first novel, drew praise from such writers as Rilke, Gide, and Beckett and is to this day the author's most celebrated work.

Quicksand

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 c"

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bove, Emmanuel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bove, Emmanuel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bove, Emmanuel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

My Friends

A Singular Man

A Winter's Journal

A Winter's Journal

Armand

A Man Who Knows

My Friends

Armand

My Friends

Quicksand