Élisabeth

“A precocious literary triumph . . . Élisabeth is far more than a footnote. It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Fifteen years before completing his first feature film—and ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at Cahiers du cinéma that would usher the journal, and French cinema, into a new era—the man who would become known worldwide as Éric Rohmer published a single novel. Released by Éditions Gallimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Marguérite Duras, Élisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the nouveau roman—and was also the “matrix,” as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.

Set in the sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer, Élisabeth is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and lie to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already present—as it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace—their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies—with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.

Eric Rohmer (1920–2010) was born Maurice Schérer in the province of Lorraine. After moving to Paris and befriending cinephiles and future directors Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut, among others, he began writing, editing, and publishing film criticism under a pseudonym supposedly cobbled together from the names of Erich von Stroheim and Sax Rohmer, respectively. Gradually following the lead of his fellow Cahiers du Cinéma contributors from theory to practice, he went on to direct more than twenty acclaimed feature films, including My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, and The Green Ray.

Aaron Kerner completed an MFA at Emerson College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he works as an English teacher at the Commonwealth School. His other translations include Augusto Monterroso's The Rest is Silence.