Alain is still young, but has become a hopeless drug addict, reduced to trading on the lingering traces of his former beauty in order to attract a rich woman. Whenever he does, he generally loses interest, until she does, too, and then it starts all over again. His plight is pathetic - "women for me have always meant money" - his disillusion with the compromises made by his friends obvious and his suicide predictable, but in the hands of a Russian writer, La Rochelle's sordid little saga about a wasted life would have achieved the black humour it frequently approaches but never quite reaches. First published in France in 1931, it was apparently based on the suicide of a friend, the surrealist poet Jacques Rigaut. The author was an anti-Semite and a Nazi collaborator. He committed suicide in 1945. Intense, cryptic and very French, his book certainly possesses a desperate energy while evoking little sympathy.
By Eileen Battersby