Pigalle
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Pierre Loiselet, être sympathique en diable, en lui offrant bien amicalement ce Pigalle et mon meilleur souvenir, René Fallet.”
Publisher's insert preserved.
René Fallet’s third book, following Banlieue sud-est (1947) and La Fleur et la Souris (1948), closes the cycle of his “acid novels,” which jointly earned him the Prix Eugène-Dabit du roman populiste in 1950.
In retrospect, Fallet did not care for this novel, written under difficult circumstances and denied the commercial success he had hoped for. Yet this hard-boiled tale, with its air of Chicago-on-the-Seine, plunging the reader into boozy evenings, jazz tunes and postwar dances amid the camaraderie of American soldiers, is far from without interest, and already announces the work to come. Make no mistake: beneath its buddy-novel surface lies a cynical portrait of a disillusioned youth adrift on the margins.
This modern western, which opens during the Liberation of Paris, is inscribed here to Pierre Loiselet: novelist, critic and journalist, who founded in 1920 La Fusée, a “bi-monthly organ of fantasy” that Fallet himself would surely not have disowned!