Emmanuel Bove's sad, ironic My Friends - I imitated him, limping for no reason.

The title of Mes Amis (My Friends, 1924) is ironic.  Our narrator, poor Victor Baton has no friends.  In each of the short sections of Emmanuel Bove’s episodic novel, Baton almost makes a friend, almost.  The failures are often but not always his fault.  Some of the failures are deliberate self-sabotage.

Baton has no family, and no past, except for his injured hand, a war injury that brings him a small disability pension.  Is he suffering from some kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or some other mental illness?  Or is he taking, although he would not call it that, a philosophical stance?  A proto-existentialist rejection of the world, to the extent that rejection is possible.  Bove’s novel is a strong, pure expression of a kind of alienation that will soon appear in a thousand French books.

The prose is simple and material, full of ordinary details and actions.  It is perfect for the French language learner.  If you are one of those, you can read the first edition digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the one I read and the source of my page numbers.  Several post-war French writers pushed back against the traditional elegance and even correctness of literary French.  Mes Amis is one of those books.  Much of it is even written in the present tense.  It is the oldest French novel I have come across written in the present tense.

Not that it stays in the present.  The EuropeNow website features a couple of pages of Janet Louth’s 1986 English translation, reissued in 2019.  See the plain language, and the short sentences and paragraphs.  Baton has noticed an attractive woman noticing him.  He fantasizes that she (or someone) becomes his girlfriend, that they go on dates:

I should pay without looking at the meter. I should leave the door open.

Passers-by would watch us. I should pretend not to see them.

Look at all of those conditional tenses.  You, the French student, still have to know your tenses, sorry, what can you do.

Note the ordinariness, the generic quality, of Baton’s fantasy.  Please also note, hidden in the middle the sudden appearance of metaphorical language:

The solo violinist would sway backwards and forwards as if on a spring-board, balancing his body. Locks of hair would flop over his eyes, as if he had just come out of a bath.

This is my favorite part of the novel, the surprising eruption of original and interesting metaphorical language amidst the usual clear, plain prose.  Bove gives his characters lot of little psychological insights, too.  There is the big psychological question – why does he drive everyone away – but also good small ones like this (Billard is a potential friend):

Billard rose slowly, balancing with his arms, limping a little, without doubt because he had remained immobile.  I imitated him, limping for no reason.  (“Henri Billard I,” 47, tr. me)

What is our narrator looking for, really?  He can’t say.

As a little bonus, the Paris of the novel, functionally described is highly recognizable.  In the “Neveu, the Sailor” episode, for example, Baton and a depressed sailor come to the verge of killing themselves by jumping in the Seine.  Various clues put them under the Pont d’Austerlitz, on the Left Bank.  Now the bike path goes right by the spot (“there was a heap of peaked sand, some tools of the city of Paris, a gatehouse, and a chained wheelbarrow” (106) – all still there).  Someone should put up a plaque.