In the Absence of Men

Product Information

In the summer of 1916, the emotionally precocious Vincent, who is the same age as the century, awakens to the possibilities of both erotic and platonic love.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This novel will undoubtedly become one of the books that will never leave me and stay on my shelf until the day I die.The room is filled with our silence, filled with the sounds of bodies brushing against each other, with the sighs of mingled mouths. Arthur and Marcel are also related, but I won't give that away, since that was the ultimate surprise ending. Yes, I was able to predict it, but only at the last minute, when I realized that all the math added up. Perhaps what is most striking is the idea that the characters have real emotions too, and they are human as well, like the rest of the population.

Part 1 of this book has lots of intimate talk, as these friendships and love develop while Arthur is home for a week from The Great War. Vincent is aristocratic and privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war and the city almost deserted of men. I also loved Lie With Me, and so it seems a great shame that not more of Besson’s work has yet been translated into English. He is arrogant, full of himself and at the same time there is no charm behind it, no cheekiness even or merciless honesty, anything that would make me believe in the friendship between Vincent and Proust, much older than the protagonist.Overall, very good book and I hope more of this author’s work is translated into English in the future. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The first part focuses on the main character's burgeoning relationships, one physical and intensely passionate, the other intellectual.

Occasionally, you pick up a book not quite knowing why you chose to read it in the first place, but then gradually, page by page, you start to realize that almost every chapter tells you a little about yourself, about your life.

I do not know, I cannot know, if all men are that same, but I have an inkling of the universal softness of the male sex. Your immediate instinctive reaction is to touch me, to press against me, to impress your body on mine, to wait for the moment when they are symbiosis, the moment when marriage makes them one flesh.

One of the most interesting literary devices I saw in this novel was the fact that parts of it were written in the second-person narrative. And then the pestilential stench reaches us from the field strewn with corpses, the stink of a slaughterhouse mingled with gunpowder. Th incessant thunder of cannon-fire flings bodies into the air, hurls bodies that are crippled, mangled, mutilated into the tracery of the shellfire. Vincent, on the other hand, expressed curiosity and fascination with sex itself and Arthur’s body than the boy himself, only to then suddenly be love-struck out of the blue.

Then there are books I love because they completely absorb me into their world, with characters I feel drawn to, and almost feel like I care about their stories in real terms. That appears to be very true for a lot of modern fiction: advertising produces covers that are more persuasive than the writing inside.