The Devil in the Flesh (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Radiguet, Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141194642 ISBN 13: 9780141194646

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2011

Synopsis

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 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 hurtle towards tragedy.

Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, this semi-autobiographical novel became an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius before his tragic death at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish and joy of adolescence, it is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty.

This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Fay Weldon.

About this title

Review:

"A triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece." "--New Statesman" "Christopher Moncrieff 's new translation carries Radiguet's frank, staccato prose well. The confessional honesty of the language is what makes the book both shocking and sad." "--Times Literary Supplement" ""The Devil in the Flesh "is unretouched and seems shocking, but nothing so resembles cynicism as clairvoyance. No adolescent be- fore Radiguet has delivered to us the secret of that age: we have all falsified it." --Francois Mauriac "Although Radiguet was so young, he had managed to zone in on the perversity of human love with an accuracy which anticipates, or is in parallel development with, Freud. . . . His insights compel us to keep reading, in the unpleasant knowledge that we may learn something, possibly even about ourselves. . . . One of the measures of the book's brilliance is that its morality, or its amorality, is not clear-cut." "--The Guardian" "A masterpiece of promise." --Jean Cocteau ."..a triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece..." --"New Statesman" "Christopher Moncrieff's new translation carries Radiguet's frank, staccato prose well. The confessional honesty of the language is what makes the book both shocking and sad." --"Times Literary Supplement" "A century on, this novella still has the power to unsettle." --"The Guardian"

About the Author:

Raymond Radiguet was born near Paris in 1903. He dropped out of his lycée in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature, and associated himself with the Modernist set, befriending Picasso, Max Jacob, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and especially Jean Cocteau, who became his mentor. His first novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh), was published in 1923 and became a runaway bestseller in France. Radiguet died of typhoid fever the same year, at the age of twenty. His second novel, Le bal du Comte d'Orgel (Count d'Orgel's Ball) was published posthumously in 1924.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0141194642
• ISBN 13: 9780141194646
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160