Henri Duchemin and His Shadows

June 8, 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.”

June 1, 2015
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.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.