In the Absence of Men

Philippe Besson

ISBN 10: 1529949092 / ISBN 13: 9781529949094

Published by Vintage Publishing, GB, 2024

About this Item

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LIE WITH MEIt is the summer of 1916 and, with German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, the sixteen-year-old son of a prestigious family, the tranquillity of the city sits at odds with the salons and soirees he attends. But, after an electrifying encounter with the enigmatic writer, Marcel P, draws Vincent's desires out into the light, his ever-riskier liaisons with a young solider begin to shape Vincent's future.Translated by Frank Wynne'A short, bold and original novel which beautifully captures the romance and amorality of gilded youth' IndependentElegant novellas-in-translation, VINTAGE EDITIONS celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781529949094

Bibliographic Details

• Title: In the Absence of Men
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing, GB
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1529949092
• ISBN 13: 9781529949094
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 200 grams

About this title

Synopsis

"Charming, impudent, privileged, emotionally precocious, Vincent de I'Etoile is the same age as the young century when he meets the elegant, asthmatic forty-five-year-old Marcel Proust, and in one week - at literary salons, at the Ritz, in private rooms, in cafes - the striking youth with black hair and green eyes fashions an intimate platonic friendship with Parisian society's most eminent outsider." "It is 1916. For two years war has ravaged Europe, though to Vincent, in Paris, the tragedies in the French trenches are more remote than real, like whispered rumors, until one blindingly brilliant summer day - the same day that he befriends Marcel - the war assumes for Vincent the human face of Arthur Vales. The son of a family servant, once a schoolmaster and now a soldier on leave for a week from the front. Arthur awakens Vincent to the possibilities of erotic love as together they embark on a sensual journey that defies the sway of convention and the dominion of death." The week ends. Arthur returns to the front; Marcel, unexpectedly, is summoned to Illiers, where he revisits scenes of his childhood and in a potently imagined, affectingly realized series of letters shares with Vincent luminous remembrances of times past. And Vincent, abandoned in Paris, dazed by absence, continues an inevasible passage into a future that will be haunted always by the dark secret he uncovers behind the love he bears for both a doomed French infantryman and a famous middle-aged Jewish writer.