In the Absence of Men

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But when you have finished reading Lie With Me, I would urge you to dig deeper into Besson and enjoy prose as you rarely find it nowadays. O diário é de uma sensibilidade incrível, e traduz bem o que será um espírito de 16 anos, vivendo as circunstâncias que a personagem vive. Deixa-te de Mentiras” - o seu livro mais conhecido em Portugal - é um livro que me encanta e que pontualmente me irrita com a mesma intensidade. 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 midst of the terrifying din, in the indescribable panic, we fought side by side, advancing the front line.

It's just that I rarely encounter books of this kind that when I actually read one, I get a little shocked. One summer, while Paris is empty of men, who have all gone off to war, Vincent happens to meet and strike up a friendship with a renowned author, Marcel. Idealmente, a realidade seria mesmo assim, mas não me parece, portanto, exige-me uma suspensão da descrença que não possuo. The first part was written in the second-person narrative as I mentioned above, which chronicled events that happened in the span of one week. Arthur and Marcel are also related, but I won't give that away, since that was the ultimate surprise ending.But it didn’t feel like it while reading and Vincent’s extraordinariness is enhanced by another man who fell for him – a young soldier, Arthur, obsessed with death and traumatized by war from which he escaped only for a few days or hours, into Vincent’s arms. The writing reminded me of the fluidity of a steady-moving stream as the water cascades over stationary stones. 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. Vincent greatly enjoyed both of these men in part 1, and misses them dearly through letters in part 2.

In the Absence of Men is a short, bold and original novel which beautifully captures the romance and amorality of gilded youth. That appears to be very true for a lot of modern fiction: advertising produces covers that are more persuasive than the writing inside.

O amor - e as cenas de sexo - entre um adolescente - filho da alta burguesia -, de 16 anos e um professor de 21 anos (soldado na frente de batalha da I Guerra Mundial e filho da empregada da casa) está construído de uma forma pouco realista para o quotidiano da burguesia parisiense do início do século.

Estamos em 1916 e Vincent dorme a noite toda, até ser manhã, com o filho da empregada, com a maior das descontracções. 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. One of the most interesting literary devices I saw in this novel was the fact that parts of it were written in the second-person narrative.

Replace one of the names with a female name and you'll get your run-of-the-mill heterosexual romantic drama. I realize that Besson's newest novel, Lie With Me, is getting all the press at the moment (partly due to Andre Aciman's correct praise, and Molly Ringwald's translation). In the Absence of Men may be, at least to me, the best indictment of both war and class distinctions I have encountered. Th incessant thunder of cannon-fire flings bodies into the air, hurls bodies that are crippled, mangled, mutilated into the tracery of the shellfire. In the summer of 1916, the emotionally precocious Vincent, who is the same age as the century, awakens to the possibilities of both erotic and platonic love.