In spite of efforts by the French publisher Flammarion to make some of Emmanuel Bove's works available to the reading public in the 1970s and 1980s, his place in French literature remains uncertain. That his novels should have languished in almost total obscurity for some fifty years is difficult to understand when one considers that it was the established writer Colette who urged the firm of Ferenczi to publish his first novel. Rainer Maria Rilke, perhaps the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, was so impressed by Bove's first novel, Mes Amis (1924; translated as My Friends, 1986), that he made a point of meeting the author in Paris. The well-known French poet Max Jacob wrote to Bove in 1928 saying that Bove's novel Un Père et sa fille (A Father and His Daughter, 1928) was one of the most beautiful books he had ever read. When the novelist...