Henri Duchemin And His Shadows

Though little-known now, 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 in 1924 arranged for the publication of his first novel, Mes amis, Bove went on to have a busy literary career, writing close to a book a year, until the German occupation silenced him. During his lifetime, Bove’s novels and stories were admired by writers as varied as Rainer Maria Rilke, the surrealists, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, who said of Bove that more than anyone else he has an instinct for the essential detail. Contemporary fans include Peter Handke and John Ashbery. Henry Duchemin and His Shadows is the perfect introduction to Bove’s world, with its cast of impoverished and forlorn but oddly stubborn isolatoes who call to mind Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Robert Walser’s various little men, and Jean Rhys’s lost women. Deploying only the simplest words and sparest sentences, Bove depicts a crepuscular urban world with photographic exactitude. The poet of the flophouse and the dive, the park bench and the pigeon’s crumb, and of days and nights as endless as the city streets, Bove is also a deeply empathetic writer for whom no defeat is so great as to silence desire.