Home » France » Emmanuel Bove » Mes amis My Friends)
Emmanuel Bove: Mes amis My Friends)
Our hero/narrator is Victor Bâton. He was wounded in the recent war, World War I, and receives a disability pension. We know that he is unable to use his left hand and cannot really do any heavy work. He lives in a small room in a rooming house which is mainly inhabited by people who do work and seem to resent the fact that he does not. He spends the day wandering round Paris and trying to meet people.
His big concern is that he has no friends and no girlfriend He would very much like to have both.He would very much like to have a male friend who was somewhat unfortunate so he could help him. He himself is not in particularly good shape. In addition to his disability he has decaying teeth and is generally not in a poor physical condition. Nevertheless he does manage to wander around Paris.
During his daily excursions, he will stop at various places to eat and drink, including a café where the owner regrets that it is no longer 1910 when people were much friendlier and even a soup kitchen where he has to queue up for a meal.
Lucie Dunois is a war widow who owns a small wine shop which he visits regularly. On one occasion ytowards closing time, she invites him in and even takes him to bed. She throws him out at five o’clock in the morning as she has to prepare for her customers. He hopes this will lead to something but it never happens again even though he regularly goes to the wine shop and a drinks wine.
As the title of the book tells us this is about his friends, only they’re not really his friends they are people he meets and who he hopes to become friendly with but it never really works out for him. The first one is.Henri Billard. They meet when there is a large crowd outside a pharmacy. Just inside we can see a very small man who is unconscious with his eyes wide open. People say he was drunk and collapsed and a local shop owner claims the man was a known drunkard. Victor and Henri move away. They start talking and.Henri invites Victor for a drink which he pays for. They will meet again and.Henri invite him to his place where he lives with his girlfriend, Nina. She turns out to be much younger than Henri and Victor is quite envious of him having a young girlfriend. However, we soon find out that the visit is not just for friendship.Henri asks to borrow fifty francs which Victor feels he has to lend him. The next day he sees Henri in the street and takes advantage of this to go and visit Nina who let him in. However, to his disappointment, it is clear that she is not going to love him. He never returns and never gets his money back.
Onw of his tricks is to look miserable in the hope that someone will feel sympathy for him and become friendly with him. He tries this when he is walking near the.Seine and he is approached by a bargeman. It turns out that the bargeman thinks he is considering suicide and the bargeman is also considering suicide and suggests they do it together by jumping in the river. The man has hold of him and while he is very miserable, he doesn’t really want to commit suicide at this point. He does finally get out of it by pointing out but he has some money and inviting a man to eat and drink with him, which the man does. Suicide is forgotten particularly when the pair of them go to a brothel. The bargeman goes off with a girl, leaving Victor alone and still friendless.
He often hangs out around the station as there are crowds there and he hopes he might meet someone particularly as he carries on his downcast look act. He is mistaken for a porter by a well-off man and carries the man’s case to a taxi but refuses any tip. The man recognises that he is down and out and asks him to come to his hous the following day and he will try to help him.
He inevitably this goes well initially, but then it all goes wrong for him again just because he’s trying to be too friendly, this time with the man’s daughter.
He meets other potential friends, including a woman singer called Blanche and that looks to be promising, but then inevitably it all goes wrong again. It even goes wrong in his rooming house as the other occupants seem to resent the fact that he gets up late and often comes home late while they have to get up early to go to work so the landlord terminates his lease.
Solitude, what a sad and beautiful thing it is! How beautiful when we choose it! How sad when it is forced upon us year after year> becomes his motto.
Inevitably this is quite a sad book. Poor Victor never seems to manage to make a friend or get a girlfriend and yet he’s always optimistic that something positive is going to happen. While it might seem to be positive in his eyes, too often partially through his own fault, it all goes wrong.
This was Bove’s first novel published under his own name- – he had published other novels when living in Vienna under a pseudonym – and became his most successful novel as people clearly sympathised with the unfortunate Victor, as we do.
Publishing history
First published in 1924 by Ferenczi & fils
First English publication in 1986 by Carcanet
Translated by Janet Louth