The Devil in the Flesh
by Raymond Radiguet

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My Rating: 4/5

I am surprised by this book for multiple reasons. First is how the main character, the hero, at the age of sixteen is portrayed as a symbol of enduring and lasting love .. without really knowing fully about what it is at his vulnerable and barely formative years. The second is the lukewarm and fatuous response the society and his parents, other elders give to the knowledge of his illicit relationship with an already married woman .. no less his elder by three years.

The protagonist and Marthe meet just as she is about to get married to a soldier during WW1. They develop a mutual interest even before her marriage but it blows over into a passionate and clingy, obsessive relationship shortly after her husband leaves for the war. They make little secret of their association to the neighbors and elders .. and face little in the name of consequences!! (which is startling and astonishing given the times we are referring to). After the initial passion starts to burn out, the protagonists find themselves unable to shake free of each other from their thoughts and company .. despite all the boulders that threaten to part them, their love thrives and lives on .. even with the death of one of them at the end.

I think this is a classic and one of the 1001 books to read for a reason .. it is quite different from other books written in similar vein and has some wisdom to inculcate to the reader in the name of juvenile love , responsibilities and mistakes etc. ( )

if I have known what the story was, I would not even have started this. But I'm happy that I did.... This is a difficult issue for me, and I'm still pondering on it. ( )

Greedy little boy
gorged with malicious pleasure
hot for a scandal. ( )

Scritto dal giovanissimo Radiguet e pubblicato l'anno della sua morte, Il diavolo in corpo narra la storia, in parte autobiografica, di un adolescente che scopre l'amore. Ambientato ai tempi della prima guerra mondiale, ha per protagonista un ragazzo che diventa l'amante di una giovane donna, Marthe, poco più grande di lui, promessa sposa di un soldato al fronte, Jacques. È un'iniziazione sentimentale e sessuale febbrile e perturbante, dall'esito tragico. Una passione sondata con sguardo penetrante dall'autore, che scandaglia i contraddittori impulsi dell'adolescenza di fronte al sesso e alla responsabilità dell'età adulta. Il romanzo, che fece scandalo alla sua uscita, ebbe un clamoroso successo come prototipo del bestseller erotico. Diventato un classico della letteratura francese d'inizio Novecento, è stato portato anche sul grande schermo nel film di Claude Autant-Lara con Gérard Philippe (1947).

A sixteen-year-old adolescent falls in love with a twenty-year-old married woman. Her fiancé (and later husband) is off fighting in the Great War, and the two carry on their relationship more or less frankly while he is away. The villlage disapproves.

This was short, and most of it was very good.

The book focuses almost solely on the inner life of its main character -- an adolescent experiencing love while society does not consider him an adult. It reminded me a lot of James Joyce’s A portrait of the artist as a young man, especially in how spot-on and how evocative Joyce’s descriptions of adolescence were; Le diable au coeur shares that strength. The desire for things that lose their appeal as soon as you voice them, the immediacy of feelings, the impatience, the way expectations are constantly adjusted to reality (and vice versa), resulting in contradictory behaviour and mood swings… Radiguet got things exactly right.

Still, in places I thought this novella dragged things out a little, kept treading water instead of moving forward. Also, the resolution (if it can be called that) felt a little like a cop-out. But I’m glad I read this: its strengths more than outweigh its weaknesses. ( )