In The Absence Of Men

'I am sixteen. I am as old as the century'

It is 1916. Vincent is sixteen, on the brink of manhood. Vincent is aristocratic and privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war and the city almost deserted of men. In that brutal summer, Vincent's beauty and precocity captivate two men: Marcel, some thirty years his senior, a writer and celebrated socialite; and Arthur, the twenty-one year old son of one of the servants, who is now a soldier at the front. Both relationships become love affairs of a kind - of the mind or of the body. Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer and far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. All of these men will suffer, and Vincent will lose the last vestiges of his childhood innocence. In the Absence of Men is a stunning first novel: in its daring in representing Marcel Proust as a character, in the beauty of its prose and in its delicacy of feeling. It is a quite remarkable debut.

During one week in 1916, 16-year-old Vincent de l'Etoile befriends the greatest writer in France and experiences the first great love of his life. Fortunately, he keeps a journal and writes letters, is an exquisitely limpid stylist (kudos to Wynne's translation), and considers himself too young to have morals. His new friend is Marcel Proust, then 45 and known to be attracted to very young men. Vincent's first lover is Arthur Vales, a soldier on leave to see his mother, a servant in the de l'Etoile household. Vincent meets Proust in the well-trafficked cafes in the afternoon and welcomes Arthur to his bed every night. After the week, Proust goes to take care of family business in Illiers, and Arthur returns to Verdun, where he is soon killed in action. This extremely romantic scenario concludes with a plunge into bathos, but the writing is so beautiful, and the characters are so convincing, that Besson's first novel seems to be the homosexual cousin of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. Ray Olson
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