Emmanuel Bove

Maurice Lesca is fifty-seven--older, not much wiser, and painfully comical in his failures. Though educated as a doctor, he's a ne'er-do-well who milks family and friends for money and lives in poverty with his widowed sister. When he encourages a divorcée to extort money from her ex-husband, Lesca sows the seeds of …

After the fall of France, colorless Joseph Bridet determines to go to Vichy and ingratiate himself with the regime there as a first step towards escaping to England, only to discover that he is in agreement with the suspicious and pitiless world of the Petainists, where everyone is as mediocre and contemptible as he is

Bove's tale of a World War I veteran living in postwar Paris, searching for friendship and warmth, is an ironic, entertaining masterpiece by one of France's favorite authors. My Friends is Emmanuel Bove’s first and most famous book, and it begins simply, though unusually, enough: “When I wake up, my mouth is open. My …