The Boy by Marcus Malte

Author:Marcus Malte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: French books;French literature;novels about world war I;world war 1 literature;WWI books;WWI novels;The Boy;Marcus Malte;WWI literature;best books about WWI;best French books;best French authors;best French writers;best war novels;historical fiction;literary fiction;romance;war novels;love story;coming of age;magical realism;epic;trench warfare;French military;southern France;best books about Paris;best paris fiction;best paris novels;best books set in the 1900s;prix femina;Peru
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:44+00:00

And who is this?

The inescapable, indispensable, incomparable father of Les Misérables, the master of Parnassus himself: Victor Hugo. We recognize the temperament and the implacable meter, chanting his pelvic thrusts in this first quatrain of a parodic sonnet: “Le Sonnet d’Arvers… à revers.”

No, this is not just second-rate cacography scribbled in a notebook. Rimbaud. Rimbaud, yes. The young King Arthur, enlightened prince, cursed archangel, he too turned his irreverence towards poetry into verses in which obscenity and mockery are spelled out with decadence and good-natured farce. See his “Stupra.” See that black pearl—if one dares—inserted into the Album zutique that he created with his partner in crime Paul Verlaine and that they named “Sonnet of an Asshole” (Dark and pleated like a violet carnation… ) and that Emma cannot recite to the boy without a ravishing turning up of the nostrils expressing both her disgust and her excitement (Filaments like tears of milk… ) nor without biting her lips to suppress a budding laugh (Cried, beneath the cruel wind that spurns them… ). We can envision them, the two genius schoolchildren, composing, laughing, a glass of absinthe or cheap wine in hand, playing around and throwing in each other’s faces their Alexandrines, their enjambments, their caesuras, fashioning half-lines of empty measures that house their subjects (Feminine Canaan in the enclosed moistness!).

They just have to procure them. Literature overflows with these licentious pages. When the young lovers find themselves in Paris again—and free of Gustave’s chaperoning—the first destination of their promenades changes: rather than gardens or cemeteries, henceforth they prefer the quays of the Seine. Romantic walks along the water? Absolutely not. The hunt for sorcerers and bookish monsters, fishing for the exiled and excommunicated: that’s what draws them. They skim the book stalls on the banks, rummage through the boxes, search in this sheaf of old paper for a volume that morality has cast out and the law censured. For those works whose success is often guaranteed by an official condemnation. Clandestine publication, circulation—and reading—under the table, under the coat, under the skirt. Emma’s fingers are dirty from letting them run over the dusty covers and spines, on the sepia sheets, sometimes completely stiff and covered with an ink that looks powdered. By the end of the day traces of anthracite smudge her skin as if she had rubbed the venomous petals of some flower of evil. She searches. The boy can only barely help her in this task but he is there, near her, if only to see her expression, the gleam of her face when she finds it, when she discovers the nugget, extracts it from the clutter, the gleam of her eyes when she looks towards him, book in hand—the printed promise of a deliciously delinquent moment—the look she gives him in that instant lights a flame in the most intimate regions of his being. For nothing in the world would he want to miss that.

When the quest remains fruitless it is sometimes necessary to specify the

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