- My Friends

Colette read the manuscript of My Friends (Mes Amis) in 1923 and launched the literary career of Emmanuel Bove (1898-1945). Rilke and Gide admired him. Though his work was eclipsed after the war, it never vanished entirely- Samuel Beckett and John Ashbery were among its advocates, and Bove has been rediscovered in France, Germany, and the United States. Jane Kramer described in the The New Yorker how Peter Handke (his Austrian translator) and the German filmmaker Wim Wenders "talk about Bove with the same sort of familiarity which Rilke felt...For them the concrete and very precise language in a story by Emmanuel Bove is a language that addresses the eye, a language that the eye can read as images." The tone of My Friends is ruthlessly accurate- the narrator, Victor Baton, describes his world of waking, washing, strolling, eating and longing, meticulously and without a trace of irony. Bove was 24 when he completed My Friends. He announced that he'd invented a genre, the novel of "impoverished solitude." His protagonist, Baton, drifts from encounter to encounter, looking for the elusive special friend. A veteran of unspecified battles, with some secret wound under his shabby coat, hungry for affection, he picks about the margins of Paris life, a ghost encumbered by anachronistic rules of etiquette, pride and vanity. His guilelessness and conceit are wonderful instruments for presenting a sequence of encounters which laughter makes timeless.… (more)