The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Writer's Journal, by Emmanuel Bove
reviewed by Brian Evenson

Trans. Nathalie Favre-Gilly. Afterword by Keith Botsford. Marlboro/Northwestern Univ. Press, 1998. 219 pp. Paper: $15.95.

Emmanuel Bove’s A Winter’s Journal explores roughly four months in the life of Louis Grandeville, an upper-middle-class man leading a life of leisure in 1930s Paris. Living with a wife he’s obsessed with but who doesn’t love him, Louis meticulously records not only his inability to keep his marriage from crumbling but also his compulsion to subject his wife and himself to mental torture. Even though he realizes he might well be, in his own words, “the architect of my own unhappiness,” Grandeville is helpless to stop. What makes the book remarkable is Bove’s refusal to flinch. Grandeville’s obsessional qualities and his inability to exit a cycle of destructive behavior are offered with great care and skill. The logic Grandeville follows has as many loopholes as that of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Because of Grandeville’s self-destructive honesty, because of his constant psychoanalyzing of himself and his wife, A Winter’s Journal is at once a painful and perceptive read—satisfying in much the same way as Scott Zwiren’s God Head or Evan Connell’s The Diary of a Rapist. Stylistically, the novel is quite simple, the language neither flashy nor showy, the action moving forward from one day to the next while the marriage is relentlessly taken apart. The novel is augmented by a long afterword by Keith Botsford, who discusses the novel, Bove’s oeuvre and life, and also the concept of literary fame. A Winter’s Journal is a difficult but compelling novel, a clear indication that Bove should be seriously reconsidered.