Henri Duchemin and His Shadows

by Emmanuel Bove, Alyson Waters (Translator), Donald Breckenridge (Introduction)

Overview

An NYRB Classics Original

Emmanuel Bove was one of the most original writers  to come out of twentieth-century France and a popular  success in his day. Discovered by Colette, who arranged for the publication of his first novel, My Friends, Bove enjoyed a busy literary career, until the German occupation silenced him. During his lifetime, his novels and stories were admired by Rilke, the surrealists, Camus, and Beckett, who said of him that “more than anyone else he has an instinct for the essential detail.”

Henry Duchemin and His Shadows is the ideal introduction to Bove’s world, with its cast of stubborn isolatoes who call to mind Melville’s Bartleby, Walser’s “little men,” and Rhys’s lost women. Henri Duchemin, the protagonist of the collection’s first story, “Night Crime,” is ambivalent, afraid of appearing ridiculous, desperate for money: in other words, the perfect prey. Criminals, beautiful women, and profiteers threaten the sad young men of Bove’s stories, but worse yet are the interior voices and paranoia that propel them to their fates. The poet of the flophouse and the dive, the park bench and the pigeon’s crumb, Bove is also a deeply empathetic writer for whom no defeat is so great as to silence desire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590178331
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	08/11/2015
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	212 KB

About the Author

Emmanuel Bove (1898–1945) was born Emmanuel Bobovnikoff to a Jewish émigré from Kiev and a Parisian chambermaid from Luxembourg. His childhood was spent in Paris, marked at times by extreme poverty in the company of his mother and younger brother, and wealth in the company of his father and stepmother. With his stepmother’s patronage, Bove acquired an education in Paris, Geneva, and, during the First World War, England. Back in Paris, he began writing while supporting himself with a series of odd jobs. He had been publishing popular novels under the pseudonym Jean Vallois for several years when Colette helped him publish the novel Mes amis (My Friends) under his own name. He continued publishing successful novels until the Second World War, at which time he was forced into exile in Algeria. He died of heart failure soon after his return to Paris.

Alyson Waters’s translations from the French include works by Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Eric Chevillard, and Albert Cossery. She is the 2012 winner of the French-American Translation Award for her translation of Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times. Waters has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and residency grants from the Centre National du Livre, the Villa Gillet, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She teaches literary translation at New York University and Columbia University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. She lives in Brooklyn.

Donald Breckenridge is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor of InTranslation, managing editor of Red Dust, and the author of more than a dozen plays, a novella, and the novels 6/2/95, You Are Here, and This Young Girl Passing. He lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

06/08/2015
The prolific and melancholic Bove (My Friends) wrote all manner of stories, fragments, and novellas before WWII, when he was forced into Algerian exile, from the off-the-cuff confessional to the darkly weird, but this collection features just a taste of these. The title story covers more in its short duration than most novels: urged by his friends to commit suicide on Christmas Eve, Monsieur Duchemin is inexplicably befriended by a nameless man who enlists him in murdering a prominent banker with a hammer, after which Duchemin undertakes a bizarre quest for redemption. Subsequent stories such as “Another Friend,” concerning a brief, passionate friendship between a pauper and a rich man, and “Night Visit,” in which a despondent young groom begs a friend to verify his wife’s disloyalty, are a vivifying crash course in Bove’s obsessions: suicide, friendship, adultery, and the sudden reversal of fortune. Unfortunately, the remaining stories don’t do much to expand on these, and dated pieces of histrionic misogyny such as “Is It a Lie?” haven’t aged well. A longer collection or a full novel might have done more for literary Francophiles and casual readers alike; but that’s not to say this book isn’t abound with mind-bendingly odd sentences that only Bove could write, such as, “She was so beautiful that he soon confused her in his mind with the woman he had dreamed of marrying his whole life,” and, “The stranger was almost a father to me.” (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Shadows and shadow selves do indeed pervade the six stories in this collection, brought together in English for the first time...each of [Bove’s] meticulously crafted stories discloses a quasi-surrealism with dashes of Poe, Kafka, and Dostoyevsky. Bove also shows himself a master of marginalization and fragmented relationships...An elegant translation of dark, brooding, and disturbing little narratives.” —Kirkus Reviews

“One of the best novelists to emerge in France during the interwar years . . . a unique, powerful, and insightful stylist." —The Review of Contemporary Fiction

“The writing is so clear, so modest, and yet not at all modest. It’s a form of writing that doesn’t exist before him, nor since. It’s like drawing with very clear lines.” —Peter Handke

“The neat turns of Bove's stories make them engaging little reads...What makes the collection worthwhile is the writing, Bove's deft touch and turns of phrase consistently impressing. These are sad stories, but the craftsmanship behind them makes for considerable reading pleasure.” —M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

From the Publisher

2015-05-19
Shadows and shadow selves do indeed pervade the six stories in this collection, brought together in English for the first time. French novelist Bove died in 1945, and each of his meticulously crafted stories discloses a quasi-surrealism with dashes of Poe, Kafka, and Dostoyevsky. In "Night Crime," the first and one of the longest, we find Henry Duchemin confronting his shadow self. He lives his life on the edge of poverty and at the beginning of the story finds himself, shabby and discontented, in a Parisian cafe on a rainy Christmas Eve. A fellow customer, "[a] woman in a damp fur coat," notices his unhappiness and challenges Henri to kill himself. This idea of self-destruction is picked up again when Henri meets a man with no name who asks that he coldbloodedly kill a rich banker (obviously a projection of Henri himself, who had earlier expressed a desire for riches). Henri remains both intrigued and tormented by his act of murder when, from an old man, he learns the life lesson that "to redeem yourself, you must suffer." Bove once again focuses on outsiders in "Another Friend," in which a stranger, Monsieur Boudier-Martel, befriends the narrator, who lives on the margins of society and feels he has no friends whatsoever. Eventually this "radiant day" becomes one of sadness, however, when the narrator discovers that Boudier-Martel is enamored not of the narrator per se but of those in his social condition. Bove also shows himself a master of marginalization and fragmented relationships, as in "Night Visit," in which Jean, the narrator, tries to help his friend Paul sort out why his wife is leaving him. An elegant translation of dark, brooding, and disturbing little narratives.

Kirkus Reviews