
“Very Small Beside the Infinite”: A Review of Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends and João Reis’s The Translator’s Bride
A cloud has passed over the sun and Victor Bâton has lost his good cheer. The colours and fragrances of springtime had, just moments earlier, proven restorative. “Now, because of a cloud,” Bâton laments, “everything was finished.” And so his dejection resumes. Bâton, an unemployed veteran of the First World War, lives alone. Every morning, his gaze opens onto the squalor of his small Parisian apartment. His walls yield easily to the sounds of his otherwise dimly perceived neighbours. He seeks out friendship but this only reaffirms his loneliness.
Bâton observes these and other disappointments—he notes the dust on his bed, the wear of his eiderdown. He also senses, while lying on his mattress, something other than repose: “I can feel the vertical bedrailings under the soles of my feet, a bit like a tightrope walker.” This note of precariousness, of tenuous balance, reaches far beyond his bedstead. Bâton, the narrator of My Friends by the French writer Emmanuel Bove, tightropes through life. Originally published in 1924, My Friends is Bove’s first novel. It was recently reissued by the New York Review of Books, whose new edition relies on Janet Louth’s previously released English translation. This follows the NYRB’s 2015 release of Alyson Waters’s English translation of Bove’s 1939 short story collection, Henri Duchemin and His Shadows. The notes struck in both books are plangent and compellingly off-key. Readers are here presented with downhearted men whose lives are torqued, variously, by melancholy and/or madness. These are characters who often struggle financially and act in self-defeating ways. Such things, it seems, are common in Bove’s fiction. For instance, Keith Botsford describes Bove as a “close [student] of the banlieu, the dreadful ’burbs that housed those who could not afford the center.” My Friends was prepared at the request of Colette, who was associated with the publisher Ferenczi, and who found, in one of Bove’s short stories, reason to believe in the fledgling author. This is noted in an elegiac piece by Jane Kramer from 1985. Kramer also reveals, among other striking details, that Colette was befuddled by Bove: “Colette did not really know what to make of Bove (‘Your friend Bove,’ she told [Philipe] Soupault once. ‘Take him away; he’s much too quiet for me’), but she liked his books, and the way he wrote them amused her.” Donald Breckenridge, meanwhile, in his introduction to Henri Duchemin, refers to Bove’s authorial interest in “a lost generation of war veterans.” Indeed, in My Friends, Bâton’s battle scars and military papers occasionally figure as tepid conversational fodder. Those moments—along with Bâton’s privately and, curiously enough, sedately recalled memories of wartime, as well as his meetings with other troubled or aloof veterans—serve to evoke a postwar milieu in which both self-reflection and interpersonal bonds are fraught and elusive. The two titles released by the NYRB hardly exhaust Bove’s corpus, which consists of the 28 books written before his death at the age of 47 in 1945. (While a number of his books have yet to be translated into English, some English translations have been published by the Marlboro Press and Carcanet Press.) But both books did well enough to introduce this reviewer to the peculiar, crestfallen appeal of his fiction, and to mark Bove’s work as essential reading. And My Friends is certainly a fine entry point. It reveals some key Bovian preoccupations: decidedly unfussy prose, for instance, and wayward characters grappling with desperation and dissatisfaction. These elements likewise appear in Henri Duchemin, whose most indelible tale may be “The Story of a Mad Man.” Its narrator renounces his family, and the woman he supposedly loves, on a perverse lark.“I want to be myself,” he declares. “After all, I’m a man. I fought in the war. I have seen dead people.” Besides the spectre of war, another Bovian emphasis is displayed here: an anxious reach for self-fulfillment through actions that inspire the reader’s revulsion or confusion. There’s something of Bâton’s troubled mind here, too, but this “mad man” occupies a more distant extremity. Everything quickly boils over in his story. In My Friends, meanwhile, and in the remaining stories in Duchemin, Bove more gingerly adjusts the psychological temperature. For an example of how these fluctuations between madness and disquiet figure elsewhere in Bove's work, one may consult A Winter’s Journal. This is Bove’s 1931 novel about an embattled marriage. In this case, the narrator, Louis, careens between tenderness and aggression via a series of diary entries. In one entry, he reflects on his desire “to remain worthy of the woman I love.” But he also notes, and variously indulges, a wish “to control the weak and make them obey my every whim.” This was not a new idea for Bove. Certain of his characters mistake cruelty or possessiveness for an idealized form of interpersonal intimacy. As A Winter's Journal reaches its conclusion, Louis’s wife, Madeleine, escapes her ordeal in part through self-composure. The narrator cannot replicate such grace, much less understand it. “I'm afraid of her when she's composed,” he admits. The Marlboro Press edition of A Winter’s Journal features Nathalie Favre-Gilly’s English translation and an afterword by Keith Botsford. Favre-Gilly, in her brief commentary on the novel, rightly highlights the strange “contrast between the unsavory traits Louis reveals about himself and the innocent candor with which he does so.” Botsford, meanwhile, refers to the “self-destructive impulse” of the story, and accurately describes the book as “an experience in mental claustrophobia.” Botsford, an ardent admirer of Bove, also emphasizes “the flatness of [Bove’s] diction.” He praises the style by likening it to “the purported neutrality of a camera that knows of no psychology, that never explains.” Bove’s prose, then, is simply expressed, even when it seems to be evincing rougher undercurrents. See, for instance, Bâton’s unnerved reaction to being asked to help his neighbour, and how a certain tranquility still ensues through the style:“One day he asked me to help him carry a box. I should have been glad to do so, but I have always been afraid of ruptures. I refused, mumbling: ‘I am not very strong, I was badly wounded.’ He has never spoken a word to me since.”For Botsford, the “ineffectuality” of Bove’s characters is made “disturbing by its curious calm.” Along similar lines, he discusses the “hermetic self-containedness” found throughout Bove’s fiction, and Bove’s variation on the theme of dépaysement. The latter refers, in this context, to a sense of alienation from one's surroundings, and one's own self. “Bove’s characters do not see themselves clearly,” Botsford argues. Instead, they tend to “drift in a sea whose strong currents and depths somehow—and inexplicably to them—sustain others without effort.” The vignettes that structure My Friends showcase this idea of inwardness and entrapment—this impression of being shackled to one’s own skewed perceptions. In one case, a man named Henri Billard fails to meet Bâton’s expectations for friendship. Acting out of a misguided sense of vengeance and longing, Bâton decides to try to discredit Billard and steal the love of his mistress. “She would understand,” Bâton tells himself. “She would leave him. And, who knows? Perhaps she would love me!” The conviction with which Bâton embraces his delusions is alarming. He’s soon beset by fear, however, and instead vows to forget these acquaintances. That sense of expansion and contraction is everywhere in My Friends. Banal or ostensible kindnesses become, for Bâton, disproportionately levitational. Insults, on the other hand, even suspected ones, can send him crashing. In one chapter, Bâton models an air of melancholy by the River Seine—Bove presents Bâton’s misery as an ambiguous combination of genuine pain and performative self-pity—and meets Neveu, a suicidal bargeman. Misreading Bâton’s intentions, Neveu urges him to jump into the Seine with him. Bâton, however, quickly dissuades him with the promise of money. And so the two venture off toward the pleasures of the city. It is not long before Bâton secretly conscripts Neveau into his delusions. “He would know no one but me,” he thinks to himself. “I should have no occasion for jealousy.”
That sense of expansion and contraction is everywhere in My Friends. Banal or ostensible kindnesses become, for Bâton, disproportionately levitational. Insults, on the other hand, even suspected ones, can send him crashing.But he soon feels that he’s been denied the respect that Neveu supposedly owes him. This is, in Bâton’s beclouded view, a matter of social hierarchy. Bâton has felt himself on the opposite side of that equation before, and Neveu is likewise a veteran, but he still refuses to empathize. He prefers instead to relish what he believes is his newly acquired status: he entertains the idea of lavishing charity on Neveu while also keeping him on “tenter-hooks.” And when Bâton’s enthusiasm wanes, when these sadistic and self-sabotaging habits run their course, he looks to protect his idea of himself as a martyr. Inwardly, he baselessly accuses his new acquaintance of mocking him. Neveu is summarily abandoned. Another chapter closes. The erratic quality of these social experiences also creep into Bâton’s notes on the phenomena of city life. We read of views quivering behind rain-soaked glass; boxes unsteadily perched atop a wardrobe; a factory “vibrating with machinery”; a bouncing gangplank; and pavement that seems to shift underfoot “like a weighing-machine.” This sense of life as something of a shaky proposition is less interpreted than noticed by Bâton, but it accords with his aggrieved world view, and his varying shares of hope and sadness. Absent from his life is the luxury of stasis and grace. He regards such things as the purview of others—those with wealth, mainly. The factory manager who meets with Bâton, for example, walks “with his hands behind his back, clicking two fingers like a Spanish dancer.” A well-off manufacturer, meanwhile, exudes a certain stature and buoyancy: “his overcoat billowed out as if he had been on the bridge of a ship.” Bâton chases after such poise, both in his own mind—he has a daydream, at one point, about “clean soles that glided over the carpets”—and within Paris, wherefrom he can sometimes observe varieties of grace. He interprets the Seine as a kind of paradise:
“I like the Gare de Lyon because, behind it, is the Seine with its steep banks, its cranes turning in the air, its motionless barges like small islands and its columns of smoke hanging in the sky, where they have ceased to climb.”My Friends solicits attention in this way—by straightforwardly following the turns, wants, and disasters of Bâton’s mind. “Whenever I leave my house, I expect something to happen which will change my whole life,” he explains. “Unfortunately nothing has ever happened.” This indicates the doleful, faintly wry atmosphere in which the novel operates. Bâton repeatedly moves between distorted expectations and familiar disappointments. He hastily envisions improbable friendships and romances. His attempts at reifying those visions are gauche or disturbing, and often informed by classism and superficial attractions. But his loneliness is ultimately so finely drawn that he earns our sympathy, even amid his compulsive navel-gazing, and his failure to comprehend others outside of the ideas and fantasies that he strangely foists upon them. It so happens that one can detect shades of Bâton in a recent English language debut: The Translator’s Bride by the Portuguese author and translator João Reis. Bove and Reis’s respective novels make for a fascinating study in contrary formal strategies. The Translator’s Bride is like an acceleration of the relatively placid complaints in My Friends. It is likewise a novel set after the First World War, and is similarly concerned with interpersonal longings and cramped spaces, but Reis’s own selfish narrator is not a veteran. In fact, he scarcely acknowledges the aftermath of the war, except, for instance, when its economic consequences allow him to mock a publisher. As for the novel’s setting, Reis has referred to it as “an imaginary city” drawn from the European countries that he’s lived in over the years. Given the text itself, and his own remarks, Reis was more focused on the narrator’s deepening solipsism than mooring the story to precise historical or geographical contexts. The narrator, like Reis himself, is a translator. (Open Letter’s release of The Translator’s Bride uses the author’s own English translation of his Portuguese text. Reis has also completed, among other examples, Portuguese translations of novels by Karl Ove Knausgård and Italo Calvino.) He angrily rants about sundry topics, including overdue payments, careless streetcar drivers, and the miasmic cooking of Mrs. Lucrécia, his well-intentioned landlady (“a genuine ungulate beast,” the narrator insists). He’s most agitated, though, by the fact that Helena, his ex-girlfriend, has sailed away toward an unspecified elsewhere. His thoughts seem less symptomatic of any desired reunion or redemption than of his own impending psychosis:
“my tie is all greasy, my sweet Helena is at sea, I wonder if you can hear me?, a small dot on the blue, smoke coming out of the ship’s funnels, I am surrounded by these imbeciles, so much coarseness, I must save enough money for the ticket and leave,”Many of the pages in The Translator’s Bride greet us with an imposing tower of text. The narrator’s ramblings run at full tilt, and are perfunctorily structured by heaps of commas. These screeching trains of thought barrel forward until, somewhere down the interminable line, they collide into a full stop. Besides those sporadic breaks, which are usually occasioned by external dialogue, little else impedes the narrator in his race toward the novel’s back cover. Strange concatenations of thought, like the following example, abound:
“Helena is probably laughing right now on the ship, she’s leaving misery behind, I burn everything around me, I’m not sure whether it’s actually the world that is in flames or if it’s just me, because I’m the only one who can smell these smells, the sulfur, the tar, the everlasting burning, am I the only one who can see reality or the only one who’s burning?, I will never know either if we all feel the same, or what I actually feel, there’s a hole in my chest and another one in my head, the worms have taken over my body,”The volcanic prose of The Translator’s Bride ultimately proves wearying. But the confidence with which Reis leans into his breathless style leaves one curious about his nascent literary trajectory. If this English language debut is any indication, Reis feels entirely unbeholden to expectations of palatability. That sense of abandon—a kind of ‘reader be damned’ surrender to the outré workings of the narrator’s id—is an intriguing creative gesture, even if the results, in this case, are not consistently fascinating or beautiful. But Reis seems to be courting such reactions. One does not create a novel of such ferocity in order to garner unanimous praise.
The volcanic prose of The Translator’s Bride ultimately proves wearying. But the confidence with which Reis leans into his breathless style leaves one curious about his nascent literary trajectory. If this English language debut is any indication, Reis feels entirely unbeholden to expectations of palatability.Still, some proponents of Reis’s fiction have applauded his work precisely because it is a departure from relatively staid tendencies in Portuguese fiction. (Incidentally, Botsford argues for Bove’s work by distinguishing it from “the mainstream of French social fiction”). One cannot help but wonder, then, about the other novels that his authorial bravado has produced, or will later produce, and to hope for additional English translations of Reis’s work. Even from afar, it is possible to glean a number of developing preoccupations. It would appear, for example, that certain of Reis’s other novels echo The Translator’s Bride by featuring close psychological studies set in proximity to major historical catastrophes—the First World War in the case of A Devastação do Silêncio (2018), and the Chernobyl disaster in A Avó e a Neve Russa (2017). In the case of The Translator’s Bride, the reading hits a snag once the grotesqueries and redundancies pile up. Unfortunately, this doesn’t take long. The narrator, after all, rushes from one bitter reflection to another. He repetitively denigrates others, and is prone to expressions of self-loathing that pertain to his career and the perceived limitations of his personality. For example, here are his thoughts on his unpredictable moods. This is affecting, to be sure, but also tediously expressed:
“I cheer up a little, the rails whine and sadden me, don’t know exactly what’s my current mood, wake up happy and lie down to sleep gloomy, on the other hand, when I wake up gloomy I rarely go to sleep happy, will the day come on which I will go to sleep sad and wake up sad?”Reis, by his own account, envisioned The Translator’s Bride as a darkly humorous story. That isn’t always borne out by the novel itself. Aspirations toward humour do not pair easily with a protagonist who has a nightmare about opening fire onto countless “ordinary people,” whom he describes as his “maimed and suffering enemies.” He is disturbed by this, at least, upon waking. “I’d rather forget these dreams,” he remarks. The nightmare isn't prophetic, and is later reinterpreted by the narrator as a “warning to renounce fighting.” But it’s also a clear extension of the contempt he harbours on a daily basis. That episode casts a pall over the entire novel. The challenges of the narration bring to mind a query made by Gavin Tomson in his review of Carellin Brooks’s novel One Hundred Days of Rain. Having found the book monotonous, he wonders about the best approach to stories of relentless woe. “Should reading a book about pain feel painless,” Tomson asks, “or does such an approach naively confuse art with entertainment, pop with prose?” Reis inadvertently leads the reader toward similar questions. Although, the problem in this case isn’t precisely about art vs. entertainment, but the need for tonal and psychological variety. As per his review, it is clear that Tomson believes that such variety is also absent from Brooks’s novel. He also stresses that he is not arguing that the novel’s “heroine should be (more) amiable or relatable.” Indeed, characters do not need to be likable to be interesting. With The Translator’s Bride, one doesn’t wish for the representation of the narrator’s pain to become more entertaining, but rather more substantive and nuanced. The novel can feel stagnant because there are so few memorable deviations from the narrator’s bile. And the references to Helena often seem like the parroting of a hollow mantra: they don’t always persuade as windows into suffering or heartache. The narrator’s first nostalgic recollection of a yellow house that had once been admired by Helena—this occurs early on in the novel—is one of the rare, glowing exceptions. It’s a small compensation, though, especially if one’s good will has already been evaporated by the novel’s otherwise prodigious vitriol. Reis does relent, then, but not for long. The following, for instance, begins on a poignant note but is quickly rerouted:
The ache of insecurity that is found at the top of this excerpt flits by the reader, and then it’s business as usual: the narrator reviling strangers. On the one hand, all of this could be interpreted as a valuable challenge—a dramatic comment about our need to humanely understand even those psychological predicaments that confuse or offend us. On the other hand, for a work of fiction, this book seems so curiously intent on repelling the reader. The few examples of tenderness or complexity are often twisted, or crowded out, by all the hatefulness that’s writ large and long. Reis, moreover, uses his narrator’s agitated mindset to throw caution to the wind with regards to the storytelling. The asyndetic thinking of the narrator is presented in such a way that it obscures our sense of design and momentum:“I feel so sad walking the streets alone, don’t know where to put my hands, how to move my arms, if I let them hang, or cross them over my chest, I look like an idiot who doesn’t know what to do with his own body, the old woman puts a knit cap on her head, then looks me in the eye as if she would love to kill me, she’s wearing mourning black, is the yellow house’s owner a similar hag?”
“I’m insane, I understand it now, I grab one thing while grabbing something else, I’m an atheist, agnostic, an unbeliever, I’m whatever people want me to be but, meanwhile, I’ll visit a fortune teller, though it’s absurd, there’s no escaping, there’s no causal relation in my actions”And why not honour the complexity of dejection, which, in the widest context, is rarely exclusively related to sadness or other negative feelings? Our impression of Bâton is not reduced by his vividly described joys, as when he visits a bathhouse or is grateful for the brief interest of a new acquaintance. Rather than weakening Bove’s emphasis on melancholy, these flashes of mirth sharpen it. Bove clarifies Bâton’s dilemma by credibly placing it amid the inevitable caprices of life, which, on occasion, can prompt one to feel or imagine something other than anguish. None of this is to say that the suffering of Reis’s narrator entirely fails to inspire compassion, nor to suggest an exact equivalence between the two characters. (Reis’s narrator seems far more psychologically troubled.) But one does miss the strengths of Bove’s style. The stylistic differences between Bove and Reis also bring to mind a recent article by Leo Robson. It concerns the opposition between two literary modes. The first is marked by orderly, unadorned prose, like in John Williams’s work, while the other is ostentatious, its form hewn to the vagaries of psychological states. (The article is mainly about how these styles have been theorized and expressed vis-à-vis American literature.) Robson at one point cites Yvor Winters’s uncharitable dislike of “the Joycian trick of going crazy to express madness.” While reading Reis’s novel, however, one may begin to partly sympathize with Winters’s aversion to “the fallacy of the imitative form,” a term that Robson defines as “the tendency to express disintegration or uncertainty through language that itself exhibits those qualities.” (As the article makes clear, Winters hardly prevented the ascendency of this form, but Robson is nonetheless curious about a hypothetical scenario in which Williams’s style achieved saliency instead.) Taken together, The Translator’s Bride and My Friends enact a similar opposition between reserve and restlessness. (Although, one can still detect a strain of the imitative form in Bove’s work, especially in “The Story of a Mad Man.”) They also affirm the obvious: neither style is inherently superior. Both can tilt toward clumsiness or excess; indeed, Robson brings such charges to an unrevealing passage from Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing. The measured prose of My Friends, linked with the episodic format, and the crisp melancholies of the narrator, creates variety and interest. But a more isomorphic bond between prose and psychology can give us something as stimulating as, say, the free indirect discourse of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. (Woolf’s third-person narration seems dynamically possessed by the busy minds and emotions of her characters.) Something comparably stimulating was—in theory, at least—available to Reis, even amid his vituperative first-person narration, but was precluded by the sobriety of Bove’s form. But Reis does not fully seize the unique poignancies and exhilarations afforded by his style. Instead, he presents, among other unpleasantries, excessively close depictions of bureaucratic ennui:
Both straightforward forms and the eschewal of the same can be worthy of celebration—the delivery, as always, creates the difference. At the risk of addressing redundancy with redundancy: some gracefully conveyed mercies, a few sustained purple passages, whether arising from the narrator’s past or his unfurling present, would only have clarified the story’s tragedy. Robson, for example, talks about how Saul Bellow’s Herzog showcases a “middle ground,” which the author achieves by “channelling the virtues of control and exuberance.” Reis only promisingly signals his own ‘middle ground,’ as when the narrator feels refreshed after talking to a fortune teller and then meets the smile of a boy outside a hardware store. One wonders what it would be like if Reis—a remarkably detail-oriented storyteller—were to fulfill the promise of such moments by carefully revealing light in addition to shade. But the narrator is psychologically imprisoned, or has come to believe that he is imprisoned, as indicated by the following excerpt:“The clerk trundles into darkness, the office is cluttered with objects, each with a numbered tag, daylight comes through two windows and falls on umbrellas, suitcases, hats, a bicycle wheel, wine demijohns, a birdcage, the clerk reads some sheets of paper with a pencil in her hand, which she uses to assist her in this intellectual enterprise, shakes her head a little, then returns to the counter”
“knowing no other perspective I center the world on me, see the world with my eyes only, if possible I would merge with Helena, would be her skin, spleen, a kidney, would be always with her and would neither commit mistakes nor make decisions, I will perhaps trip someone, burn their head, kill them, and finally be sentenced to the ship galleys”Bove, in his own tale of alienation, avoids this sense of exhausting weight. This is achieved not just through his prose style, but also his more spirited interest in tonal and narrative variety. In moments like the following one, for example, Bâton's tragedy is made newly involving:
“I think about death and the sky, for whenever I think about death, I think about the stars too. I feel very small beside the infinite and quickly abandon these thoughts. My warm body, which is alive, reassures me. I touch my skin lovingly. I listen to my heart, but I take good care not to lay my hand on the left side of my chest for there is nothing which frightens me so much as that regular beat which I do not control and which could so easily stop.”This passage appears late in the novel, after Bâton has been evicted and has plummeted toward greater depths of loneliness and self-pity. He soothes his pain by imagining the legacy he’ll leave behind: one in which scores of children, grateful for his presents, will carry on his memory. Bove places that delusion next to Bâton’s musings on skies and heartbeats—the hopes and wounds of a lonely hour. The author is neither amplifying nor softening Bâton’s psychic burdens here. He convincingly locates them amid the wider turns, the emotive ebb and flow, of one life. That is, a life that is a bit like the reader’s—one at the mercy of rhythms and contingencies. Without stigmatizing or diminishing Bâton’s psychological upheaval, Bove patiently draws us nearer to him. And Bâton ultimately seems like more than his flaws or sadnesses; some hope endures. As the cliché goes, no person amounts to just one thing. The Translator’s Bride, on the other hand, often reads like a single downbeat note. To Reis’s credit, though, his novel still resounds in the mind long after the devastating final page. His narrator is simply too agonized to be forgotten. For some readers, the single-mindedness of the character may also constitute a bold psychological inquiry of sorts—the author's unhesitant expedition into an embittered mind. But the potential effectiveness of Reis's novel will likely depend on, for instance, the degree to which you appreciate variety or transcendence in fiction. For this reviewer, reading My Friends and The Translator's Bride together—and feeling keenly the success of the former and the enervating weight of the latter—generated a bracing reminder of the fragility of literature’s oft-mentioned empathetic capacity: that is, a novel’s ostensible power to draw us closer to the experiences of others. Williams, as quoted in Robson’s piece, argued that a certain type of writing “enables us to think or feel otherwise than we do, and to know someone other than ourselves.” But when that connective power seems attenuated or absent in a story, the reader is pushed out into the cold, and thereupon left to wish for a more robust connection—or to feel, as Bâton puts it, “tormented by a longing to have something.”