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.

On one level, The Stepson is the tale of a young man's infatuation with his stepmother, a well-placed bourgeoise with painterly ambitions, of that young man's replication of his father's life (low-class affair, illegitimate son, marriage); and of his own successive marriages and affairs, none of which work. At a much deeper level, it is a study of what Russians call (after Goncharov's novel) oblomovschina, the paralysis of the will. Jean-Noel, the stepson in question, is a nullity with ambitions as long as he needn't do anything to advance them. He doesn't act, he undergoes. It is the intricate, tortuously rationalized play of his passivity before fate (an awful biological mother, a dreadful, deprived younger brother; young women, on an ascending social scale, who want to fill his void) that makes this one of Bove's most fascinating novels, a sort of tragic bedroom farce. . Bove is the Proust of the lower orders, of the defeated, of collective anonymity; he is all circumstance, context, distance. His style is a form of hyper-objectivity; his world bathes in a light where events always just fail to be understood. We should be grateful that forty years after the oblivion into which he fell after 1945 we have recovered a novelist whose work so perfectly incarnates the underside of French life between the wars, and who is now recognized as one of the key French writers of this century.

Paris in the 1930s: Louis Grandeville has a beautiful wife, a nice home, a loyal servant, and a large circle of well-placed friends. His financial situation doesn't require him to work. Yet Louis is obsessed by the nagging reality that he never has and never will amount to anything. He believes his life is devoid of any affection or goal, filled instead with a thousand trifles intended to relieve its monotony, and populated with human beings he seeks out to avoid being alone but for whom he cares little. Every few days for one winter, Louis writes down the details of his unhappy marriage. Although his wife, Madeleine, is the focal point of his journal, his painstakingly rendered analyses of her behavior tell us more about him than her, and about the harm two people can do to one another. Unsparing and insightful, A Winter's Journal remains one of the most devastating novels ever written on the self-destructive impulse present in all marriages.