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Henri-Pierre Roché (1879–1959)

Teoksen Jules ja Jim tekijä

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Image credit: 3rd man in is Roché

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Associated Works

Two English Girls [1971 film] (1999) — Original book — 27 kappaletta
Henri Pierre Roché (2015) — Avustaja — 2 kappaletta

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Syntymäaika
1879-05-28
Kuolinaika
1959-04-09
Sukupuoli
male
Kansalaisuus
France
Syntymäpaikka
Paris, France
Kuolinpaikka
Sèvres, Hauts-de-Seine, France
Asuinpaikat
Paris, France
Koulutus
Académie Julian, Paris, France
Ammatit
author
journalist
art dealer
art collector
diplomat
novelist
Suhteet
Wood, Beatrice (lover)
Lyhyt elämäkerta
Henri-Pierre Roché was born in Paris, and studied art at the Académie Julian. He became a diplomat, journalist, art collector and dealer and was a friend of many young artists such as Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso. Gertrude Stein described him in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He was also a close friend of Marcel Duchamp, and went with him to New York City in 1916. There, he and Duchamp teamed up with Beatrice Wood (who was the lover of both men) to found The Blind Man, an avant-garde magazine that was followed the Dada art movement.

Late in his life, he wrote and published two successful novels, Jules and Jim (1952) and Les deux anglaises et le continent (Two English Girls, 1956). Both works were adapted into films by French director François Truffaut.

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

Franz e Pierre si conoscono a Montparnasse nel 1906 e tra i due nasce subito una profonda amicizia caratterizzata da lunghe conversazioni sulla letteratura, la pittura e le donne. Nel 1910 compiono un viaggio in Sicilia e in Grecia, dove rimangono piacevolmente colpiti da un gruppo scultoreo raffigurante un giovane che solleva una ragazza, il cui sorriso, crudele ed enigmatico, cambierà le loro vite. Nell'autunno del 1912 arrivano a Parigi per studiare con Maurice Denis tre pittrici berlinesi tra cui Helen Grund, giovane che possiede lo stesso sorriso misterioso della statua greca. Helen e Franz cominciano a frequentarsi e nel 1913 fanno ritorno in Germania dove si sposano.

Lo scoppio della Prima guerra mondiale separa gli amici fino al 1920, quando Pierre, tornato dagli Stati Uniti, fa visita a Franz e Helen nello châlet che gli Hessel possiedono nei dintorni di Monaco di Baviera. La guerra non ha cambiato il rapporto tra Franz e Pierre, ma ha intaccato quello tra i coniugi Hessel; è durante questa visita che Roché inizia una relazione con la moglie dell'amico, e con il suo consenso.

Nella casa si ha la sensazione di vivere qualcosa di straordinario. Pierre, che dal 1901 annota sui suoi taccuini tutto ciò che gli accade, pensa di raccontare quello che i tre amici stanno vivendo considerandone i rispettivi punti di vista. Franz decide di non aderire al progetto, mentre Helen ne è entusiasta. Nonostante al suo ritorno in Francia Pierre riceva da Helen pagine del suo diario, il progetto viene accantonato; sarà ripreso solo a partire dal 1941, quando l'occupazione tedesca e la morte dell'amico convincono Pierre a rendere omaggio a Franz dedicandogli un romanzo. Hessel, di origine ebrea, era deceduto a seguito dell'internamento in un campo del sud della Francia, dove si era rifugiato con la famiglia per sfuggire alla persecuzione nazista.
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
kikka62 | 8 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jan 30, 2020 |
The film is so beautiful, and so iconic, that the book was almost bound to be a disappointment. As with Deux anglaises..., Truffaut improved the story considerably in tightening it up to fit within his medium. He certainly seems to have lifted the best of Roché's prose.

In the book, the sequence of apparently arbitrary, haphazard scenes covering something like twenty years in the lives of the main characters only slowly starts to take shape as a constructed narrative. It isn't easy to work out how much this is a deliberate literary device, and how much it is simply Roché sticking in assorted scenes from real life and then tweaking them a bit to fit the storyline. The back-and-forth between Jim and Kathe in the second half of the book does seem to go on for far too long, somehow. Many of the episodes don't add to our understanding of the characters at all, but just reinforce what we already know about them. On the other hand, the novel is only a little over 200 pages long - it obviously says something about the economy of Roché's style that he manages to present so many scenes in such a short space.

As others have said, Jules remains something of an enigma. Jim seems to be the main viewpoint character, with Jules always a rather passive figure in the background. As we get to the end of the book, it starts to appear as though it is Jules who is telling us the story, putting himself in Jim's position, but this is never quite made clear. And there are other odd silences. The First World War, with Jules and Jim fighting on opposite sides, is dismissed in a couple of sentences. Jules is a Jewish, German writer, living in Paris, with property and investments in Germany. All of these facts are explicitly presented to us in the text. They would clearly have had a big effect on what happened to him between the late twenties, when the story ends, and the late fifties, when Roché wrote it. But we are told nothing at all about this. Why does Roché set this up in our minds but not use it?

The really big silence in the text, of course, is the nature of the relationship between Jules and Jim. Are they just friends who happen to share a series of women? Are they in love with each other without knowing it? Are we supposed to assume that they have a sexual relationship we're not told about? The only hint we get is one very suggestive sentence: "Il jouissait du bon cigare de Jules bien plus que du sien." (pt.III, ch.III). This can't be accidental, but it might just be a deliberate tease for the overanalytical reader: Roché doesn't seem to be the sort of writer to miss out on the shock value of a salacious plot point, so I think he would have told us about it in so many words if Jules and Jim had had a sexual relationship.

Having read both his novels (and seen what Truffaut managed to do with them), I think my conclusion would be that Roché was a good writer, but not a particularly good novelist. His prose style is very agreeable to read, especially in small doses, and it is interesting to read his take on the early years of the century from the perspective of old age (especially from a writer who had lived through the whole modernist movement before he wrote his first novel!), but his characters remain infuriatingly pig-headed. It is curious too, how he can write two rather similar stories, but arbitrarily give one a tragic ending and the other a comic one. Are we supposed to conclude that that goes with a fundamental difference between a man loved by two women and a woman loved by two men?
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
thorold | 8 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Apr 8, 2010 |
Originally published in 1956 when he was already in his seventies, this was the second of Roché's two novels, nowadays remembered mostly because François Truffaut adapted both of them for the cinema. This one was filmed in 1971 as Les deux anglaises et le continent — no doubt doctorates have been gained over the question of why Truffaut added a definite article to the title.

The story is set in the first decade of the 20th century, and is pretty much summed up by the title. Two English sisters, Ann and Muriel, make friends with a young Frenchman, Claude, and run through various phases of love and sexual attraction, complicated by the interference of their respective mothers.

As you would expect, the novel plays around a good deal with the contrast between the puritanical, Anglo-Saxon approach to sexual morality and enlightened "continental" openness. Roché's position, as someone who was a contemporary of the characters he is describing, but who is writing with the hindsight of fifty years, makes this particularly interesting, but you do feel occasionally that he must be exaggerating a bit. (Muriel's "confession" about her masturbation habit being a case in point.) The period titbits are quite fun - Toynbee Hall, amateur boxing matches and so on - but there are also points where you feel that Roché isn't quite as well-informed about the English as he likes to think. Muriel is supposed to be evangelical in her religious beliefs, for instance, but this doesn't come over at all in what she says and does: she talks more like a French Roman Catholic.

The main difficulty with the structure of the novel is that it's Claude's story, but it's mainly told through the voices of Ann and Muriel, in their letters and diaries. Claude's voice is largely absent. When we do hear it, mostly in the early part of the book, it confines itself to rather dry factual accounts of events or bits of sophomoric know-allism ("I can't marry you any more because I've read Nietzsche"). He is clearly meant to be continent as well as Continent. The women, Muriel in particular, are voluble, emotionally complex, and anything but enigmatic, but they are equally clearly the products of Claude's/Roché's fevered imagination, rather than real flesh-and-blood women. Muriel becomes obsessed with Claude (in his absence) to an extent that would be embarrassing even in a Brontë novel; Ann becomes a liberated modern woman practically overnight, thanks to Claude's sexual initiation service. Truffaut quietly improved the story quite a bit by shifting the focus to Claude, and foregrounding the way that we only see the women through his eyes. He uses a number of passages lifted from the earlier novel Jules et Jim to give more substance to Claude as a character (e.g. Jules's teenage suicide attempt is transferred verbatim to Claude) and has Claude publishing a story that is obviously Jules et Jim.
… (lisätietoja)
½
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
thorold | Mar 29, 2010 |

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