henri duchemin and his shadows [emmanuel bove]

Bove’s stories are full of young men who seem to have become separated from their selves. Either by choice or chance. Clearly there’s something of his contemporary, Kafka in all of this, as well as hints of the post-war writings of his compatriots, the existentialists. However, there’s something more mundane about Bove’s characters. They are insistently normal. A man who suspects his wife of infidelity, haunted by the night she might or might not have had with a lover; a man who plans to return to his family after an absence of years, but upon arrival at the family home feels as though the abyss that has opened up between them could never be bridged, and flees. Another man who believes he has found a friend to support him in at a moment of poverty, but the friend is a phoney do-gooder, who collects lost causes and discards them as quickly as he finds them. Perhaps most hauntingly of all, another man who, seemingly for the hell of it, chooses to cut the ties to his happy life and walk away, leaving only confusion and upset in his wake. In most of the stories the characters inhabit a seemingly stable world which is in fact in danger of evaporating at any moment. The void is just around the corner.

This voice also feels like one that resonates with the chaos that Europe became in the first half of the twentieth century. The nineteenth century certainties were ripped asunder and young men and women edged towards existential crisis, a crisis that would reach apogee in the second world war. At times it feels as though Bove is talking about people who survived some terrible calamity, but never managed to fully recover, instead finding themselves forever on the cusp of madness. One imagines the lost exiles of Syria and beyond, those who fall through the net, forever inhabiting the kind of half-life which Bove’s characters lead. The trauma might have dulled but the effects will never be ended.