The "secret" writer who captured the spirit of a very miserable time

Emmanuel Bove (1894-1945) was originally named Emmanuel Bobovnikoff and was the son of a Russian-Jewish father and a Luxembourgish maid. He lived a hectic life, between cheap boarding houses and shabby hotels, lung disease, and financial hardship. In 1924, the writer Colette published his first book, which is now available in Catalan thanks to a brilliant translation by Josep Alemany. My friends It is a perfect example of Bove's talent, a "secret" writer, highly recommended among writers, who has not made much fortune below the Pyrenees. Patrick Modiano, although Bove lacks the fog that surrounds the French Nobel Prize winner's characters, but rather the melancholy and sadness in the background. Everything is cleaner and clearer, rawer and more concise: "Before each customer there was a bottle and a glass. Music could have been made with a knife."

The book is made up of a series of character portraits that work as well together as separately. The thread that unites them is the character of Victor Bâton, a wretch with a very good heart who—according to him—does nothing but take beatings while wandering through taverns, boarding houses, and seedy streets of Paris in the 1920s (a century ago!), convinced that everything will go wrong and that no one will ever love him. Those he presents as "my friends" are nothing more than strangers he bumps into and with whom he tries to establish some kind of connection, but it never works out: they either swindle him, abandon him, or don't show him an ounce of love. But this is what he announces from the beginning, which makes us suspect that it's his misanthropy that acts as a refracting element for anyone who tries to get close to him. In the context of rampant individualism to which capitalism has led us today, it's not so unusual to read stories about how someone tries to overcome agonizing loneliness and fails.

The ability to create images with almost nothing

But what is so exceptional about Emmanuel Bove? Why did he appeal so much to poets like Max Jacob and Rilke, or to musicians like Sacha Guitry? Perhaps it's his ability to create images with almost nothing. A nail and a hanging garment are enough to create a beautiful image that reveals what he wants to convey: "The pipe of my little stove is bandaged with a rag, just like a knee." Nothing more is needed to describe a poor man's room. Perhaps because Bove knew how to capture the spirit of a very miserable time, that of interwar Europe, when all the amputees emerging from the trenches of the First World War wandered like lost souls through the dirty, dark streets of cities like Paris, Brussels, and Luxembourg, attempting the age-old task of huffing and puffing at the rich.