My Friends was Emmanuel Bove's first and most successful novel, though I doubt it would be read at all today if it weren't for the new reprinting by the New York Review of Books. In his time, Bove was an extremely prolific writer, writing 22 novels before his death at age 47 (and that's not counting the novels published under a couple of pseudonyms), though only a handful of his works have been translated into English and he is now largely forgotten.

My Friends is a simple and likeable little novel, told with dismal charm and an equally hopeful and despairing world view. Our protagonist is the lonesome and desperately poor war vet Victor Bâton, a wandering soul without a friend in the world. The novel is separated in several parts, each one dedicated to a failed friendship. Victor meets a suicidal bum, a wealthy factory owner, a luxurious theatre singer, a wine-shop proprietor and the lover of a girl with a limp. With each he attempts to form a connection, but it just never seems to work out, and he is always left glumly alone once again.

This was an intriguing and pleasantly slim read, though I'm a little perplexed at the amount of four and five star ratings it's been given. Bove's short and to the point sentences can get a bit boring at times, and Victor's constant remarks on the things he's noticed in different types of people and their behaviours take themselves as insightful and maybe even profound, but are often just obvious or plain idiotic. I am interested to read more Bove though, maybe Armand or Henri Duchemin and His Shadows, providing I can find copies.