Back Among Men, Philippe Besson

Ten years after the publication of En l'absence des hommes, Philippe Besson's first book, comes Retour parmi les hommes, a feverish, lyrical, and nostalgic sequel to this sumptuous novel that has become a cult classic.

In 1916, upon the death of Arthur, his young lover killed in battle, Vincent de l'Étoile, the hero of En l'absence des hommes, fled. First to Italy, then to Egypt, Sudan, Abyssinia in Rimbaud's footsteps, Syria, Lebanon; a wandering as an inconsolable, impoverished, and dreamy vagabond; then the crossing of the Atlantic in an emigrant ship, America, New York in the twenties. After several years of drifting and mourning, Vincent returns to France in 1923; it is as if he finally accepts Arthur's death. When he returns to his hometown, he recognizes nothing and struggles to find his place in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. His mentor, the writer Marcel Proust, has also died. But chance brings him into contact with Raymond Radiguet, who has just published Le Diable au corps. He is a very young man, talented, brilliant, charismatic, who deeply seduces Vincent. The attraction is reciprocal, although Radiguet is heterosexual. With his energy and joie de vivre, the fashionable writer, protégé of Cocteau, draws his new friend into Parisian intellectual circles and the wild nights of Montparnasse. But there is a dark side to Radiguet, a flaw in this twenty-year-old boy who, despite his dazzling and sudden fame, seems to sense the tragic fate awaiting him and the typhoid fever that will kill him in December 1923.

A hypnotic wandering across the world, invoking the ghosts of Kafka, Rimbaud, Nizan, or Dos Passos, a solitary journey where the hero gets lost and dissolves more than he rebuilds himself, where uprooting remains even once his roots are rediscovered, this beautiful book, both serious and luminous, is a heartbreaking love song to the glory of the disappeared, a book about pain experienced as internal exile.