Night Departure; and; No Place

by Emmanuel Bove, Carol Volk (Translator)

French soldiers escape from a German prison camp during World War II and, on foot and unarmed, make a dangerous and heroic journey back to France, beset by hunger, paranoia, physical exhaustion, and hopelessness.

467 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Emmanuel Bove, born in Paris as Emmanuel Bobovnikoff in 1898, died in his native city on Friday 13 July 1945, the night on which all of France prepared for the large-scale celebration of the first 'quatorze juillet' since World War II. He would probably have taken no part in the festivities. Bove was known as a man of few words, a shy and discreet observer. His novels and novellas were populated by awkward figures, 'losers' who were always penniless. In their banal environments, they were resigned to their hopeless fate. Bove's airy style and the humorous observations made sure that his distressing tales were modernist besides being depressing: not the style, but the themes matched the post-war atmosphere precisely.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume combines the last two novels Emmanuel Bove wrote, finishing them just prior to his death in 1945 while living in exile in Algiers. They are linked books and can be read seamlessly as one. As with Quicksand, these are not pleasant novels to read. Unlike Bove's earlier pre-war novels, which though certainly not uplifting, at least featured charming anti-protagonists always good for the occasional humorous comment or observation, these novels are bleak affairs permeated by anxiety and paranoia. In Night Departure, the narrator and his band of comrades plan and execute an escape from a German work camp, then travel through Germany towards Belgium and ultimately occupied France. Bove's narrator, whom we then follow into his home city of Paris in No Place, is consumed with the fear of being recaptured, more so than his comrades, whom at times he feels are conspiring against him. In fairness there is cause for his heightened paranoia, which I won't reveal, but at times it is hard to keep this in mind, so outrageously does he often behave. The circuitousness of his thinking is maddening, his constant considering and reconsidering, his incessant attempts to anticipate what will occur, what a certain person is thinking and/or will do—all of it causes the reading experience to grow increasingly claustrophobic. There is only so much hand-wringing one can tolerate, even from an escaped prisoner. Many times I considered abandoning the book altogether, but for the simple nagging question holding me back of what will happen to this man, will he ever be able to relax again. In the end I gave in and committed to finishing it, for on rare occasions unpleasant books simply compel you to finish them. Now that it's finally over I feel vaguely unsettled but I'm hoping that will pass.

[Antiabecedarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

BETTER AND MORE SUCCINCT THAN CELINE. But if you can't get enough of "oh shit...!! It's not right!!" and you are hungry for the landscape of war manifested by the very same characters who make up what is now Western Playland, take this up and get a very good idea of what delighful inanity we've wandered through just recently, to get to here. It's not so very far removed, and these same strange ideals have been transferred to other lands, in case we forget and lose sense of what it's like to hide in the ditches, or miss it, and maybe have some perverted romantic desire to test ourselves further- or can't control an impulse to keep on blowing things up. Then again, my memory of this book is only that I loved reading it, and it served as a substitute after an overdose of one Celine, and I am mixing up my memory with a battle scene in another book, involving an entirely different party of the 1st. Ie: WW1 was a strange strange thing to have happened to make for so many interesting portrayals of lost men, and still serves as a useful device... I was remembering Ian McEwan's handy tale of the completely inept British air invasion and how the French did not feel up to Protecting and Defending their Borders, and did the man die or did he not die... that really was the question. "Atonement." No, friends, I don't make sense. I'm getting a headache.