Belle du seigneur

Albert Cohen offers here a scathing satire of bourgeois society and diplomatic circles obsessed with strategies of social advancement. Beneath this demystification of human relationships lies the arrogance and futility of a society sinking inexorably into antisemitism and war. Widely regarded as the most striking anti-love-novel of twentieth-century French literature, Belle du Seigneur amounts to a merciless indictment of passionate love: its protagonists, Solal and Ariane, suffocate within the perfect passion they have imagined and whose roles they play out.

“What a piece, what a monster! 845 pages, 32 francs and roughly as many hours of reading: one is terrified… Yet one attempts the adventure. One plunges into the enormous story: the mechanism takes hold and one is trapped. Dazzling beauties, torrents of bad taste: one is swept away by the one, dazzled by the others. One emerges rather stunned, one’s head empty, but let us be frank: the game was worth the candle.” (François Nourissier, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, September 1968).

The novel breaks a fourteen-year silence (Le Livre de ma mère appeared in 1954): “I remember the day we brought it in, feverish and anxious. The literary director who received us then was frightened, and did not want to publish this ‘monstrous’ work. We left crushed. (…). Fortunately, good Gaston Gallimard took things in hand. We cut the passages that were too long, and these became the material for Les Valeureux, which appeared in 1969.” (in Les Nouvelles littéraires, October 1981, p. 20).

A very fine copy in wrappers.