My Friends - Softcover

Bove, Emmanuel; Louth, Janet [Translator]

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586086234 ISBN 13: 9780586086230

Publisher: Carcanet, 1988

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

From Publishers Weekly

This wistful, sad little French novel from the 1920s is here translated into English for the first time. Bove, who died in 1945, has regularly been admired by other writers but never by a wide audience. His melancholy clown, Baton, is a damaged veteran of the Great War, living from hand to mouth in the dank rooming houses, filthy soup kitchens, grubby cafes and drab streets of the Paris no tourist knows. He longs only for a friend whom he can love, and who will love him; but in a sequence of accidental encountersgenerally with gross, coarse, unfeeling peoplehis life is briefly jarred but never significantly altered. A man of exquisite sensibilities, hoping that one day, against all odds, something splendid will happen, Baton finds the doors remain shut against him. If Marcel Marceau's eternally yearning little man could remove his mask and find a voice, he might look and sound like this one.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carcanet
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0586086234
• ISBN 13: 9780586086230
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160