In the Absence of Men

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For Vincent, the sixteen-year-old son of a prestigious family, the tranquillity of the city sits at odds with the salons and soirees he attends.

This novel will undoubtedly become one of the books that will never leave me and stay on my shelf until the day I die. In the Absence of Men may be, at least to me, the best indictment of both war and class distinctions I have encountered. You can feel the tragic pieces in this story prior to them happening, but the heartache still arrives. The writing reminded me of the fluidity of a steady-moving stream as the water cascades over stationary stones. That appears to be very true for a lot of modern fiction: advertising produces covers that are more persuasive than the writing inside.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Prix du Premier Roman de l'AD de la Sarthe - Union Nationale Culture et Bibliothèque pour Tous (UNCBPT) - Site officiel". forward, crouch, resting on one knee on the ground, stop, aim, perhaps kill someone, set off again, hope that we are not in someone else's sights.

Frustré par ce dénouement qui, pour moi, n'ajoute rien à la tristesse ressentie par les événements de la deuxième partie du livre, mais qui plutôt retire de la crédibilité à cette histoire pourtant si plausible et émouvante.

The English translation received positive reviews from several publications including Kirkus Reviews, and the Washington Post. Part 1 of this book has lots of intimate talk, as these friendships and love develop while Arthur is home for a week from The Great War.

FRANK WYNNE has translated over fifty works from French and Spanish by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Ahmadou Kourouma, Tomás González and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. He is a two-time winner of the Premio Valle Inclán, for Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras (2012) and for The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto (2014). And then the pestilential stench reaches us from the field strewn with corpses, the stink of a slaughterhouse mingled with gunpowder. Vincent greatly enjoyed both of these men in part 1, and misses them dearly through letters in part 2. In the course of his career, his translations have earned him the IMPAC Prize for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq (2002), the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2005), and he has twice been awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation in 2008 and most recently in 2016 for Harraga by Boualem Sansal.

And I don’t know if that is how sixteen year-olds spoke in early 20th century France but damn that was a very indifferent teenager. I do not want to reveal what the climax was about, but once everything fits into place, one would just be swept away. This book follows a moderately similar format in that it is told in two parts but this time along a liner timeline rather than in two different time periods. Replace one of the names with a female name and you'll get your run-of-the-mill heterosexual romantic drama. Vincent meets Marcel in a salon, while he meets Arthur in their estate, since Arthur has a week of leave from the army, and his mother is the governess for Vincent's family.

In the Absence of Men is a novel by Phillippe Besson published originally in French by Éditions Julliard in 2001. A profound, yet simplistic, analysis of love, seen through the eyes of sixteen-year-old Vincent d'Etoile.You find that you could send whole fragments of text to relevant people in your life because those fragments tell them precisely the things that you dare not tell them or wish to tell them.