The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet

[Diane]

Rating: 4 stars

The story of an affair between a teenage boy and a woman whose husband was away fighting during WWI. This is a surprisingly mature view of such an affair, considering the author was only a teenager when he wrote it. Sadly, the author died at the age of 20 with few published works in his repertoire. I heard that a couple of films were made of the movie, and one of them was very explicit. The book version, however, was relatively tame.

[Rosemary]

This is an emotionally ruthless description of an affair between a boy of 16 and a married woman of 18 or 19. It was a runaway bestseller but it was also condemned because the female character's husband was a soldier fighting in WW1. I would have liked it more if I hadn't known from the introduction how the young author got his information and what damage that did to real people. But that doesn't detract from what a great a book it is, except for the melodramatic ending, which was imposed by publishers who thought the original ending was too nebulous.

[Jane]

Not my favorite. It is hard to care about a main character that is so self-centered and "seems to lack redeeming features" (to quote the afterword by Christopher Moncrieff). The same could be said of his lover, her parents, and his parents. I guess that's part of the point of the book -- to critique the hypocrisy of the middle-class. I'm just glad it was short.

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