L’Odyssée d’un transport torpillé

New illustrated edition of the celebrated maritime war narrative, originally published anonymously under the single letter “Y,” and winner of the Prix Femina in 1917.

This epistolary novel, first published by Payot in 1917 while the war was still raging, was an immediate success. Through the fictional correspondence of the first officer of the cargo ship Pamir, it describes with precision the conditions of navigation, life on board, and the anxieties of sailors in the Atlantic during the submarine war. The realistic, sober and technical tone of Maurice Larrouy, a naval officer, gives the text its full evocative power.

The present version is illustrated with modern black-and-white compositions, which further enhance the visual dimension of the narrative. L’Odyssée d’un transport torpillé was illustrated twice in the early 1920s: by René Kieffer in 1926, with illustrations by Georges Braun, but before that under the aegis of another binder-publisher for this edition, with fine illustrations by Charles Fouqueray, limited to only 150 copies.

This later edition does not appear in Norton Cru’s Témoins, unlike the original, since the author had deliberately excluded maritime narratives from his corpus. It nevertheless allows us to trace the editorial and iconographic evolution of one of the great successes of French war literature, too often overlooked.

The original drawings and various other documents (bons à tirer, proofs) were given to the Society’s members to enrich their copies during a raffle held at the Society’s annual dinner on October 22, 1924, and a number of subscribers’ copies were considerably enriched with extra material on that occasion.

Copy enriched with the original drawing from page 53, awarded by raffle to Édouard Jacqz at the Society’s dinner on October 22, 1924.

Carteret, Illustrés IV, p. 232.