The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet
The tragic and complicated French romance about a teenage boy who seduces the wife of a soldier during World War I--and one of the most startling literary debuts of all time A Penguin Classic As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman who is married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they can only hurtle towards tragedy. Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, and loosely based on his life, The Devil in the Flesh became an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius, before dying tragically at the age of twenty. It is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty about power, betrayal, and passion that expresses all the anguish and joy of adolescence.RAYMOND RADIGUET was born in 1903 in Saint-Maur, a small town outside Paris. He was the son of a cartoonist, but little else is known about his childhood until, at age 16, he dropped out of school after an affair with the wife of a soldier off fighting in the first World War, to go to Paris. Once there he quickly began writing for the magazine Sic, alongside writers such as Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, and he befriended many notable Modernists, including Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Despite his age, he also quickly developed a reputation for fast living; Ernest Hemingway would later accuse him of sleeping with Cocteau, among others, to advance his career. At the age of 18, after writing a collection of poems that would only be published posthumously, Les joues en feu, Radiguet moved to a fishing village near Toulon to work on the novel that would become his masterpiece, The Devil in the Flesh, which was based on his high school affair. Cocteau would later claim that he'd had to lock Radiguet in his hotel room to keep him from drinking binges rather than writing. The author's youth and the scandalous story made the book a sensation, but Radiguet did not have long to enjoy his fame. Less than a year later, shortly after taking a trip with Cocteau to the country to finish a second novel, Le Bal du comte d'Orgel, Radiguet died of typhoid fever at age 20. Composer Francis Poulenc said of his death, For two days I was unable to do anything, I was so stunned.
CHRISTOPHER MONCRIEFF is one of the world's premier French translators. He has translated the work of Gustave Flau- bert, Victor Hugo, and numerous other French masters.| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780714501932 |
| ISBN 10 | 071450193X |
| Title | The Devil in the Flesh |
| Author | Raymond Radiguet |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd |
| Year published | 2000-10-16 |
| Number of pages | 128 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |