My Friends

Victor Baton is a wounded war veteran trying to reestablish his prewar lifestyle but avoid work. Living in a run-down boardinghouse, Baton spends his days searching Paris for the modest comforts of warmth, cheap meals, and friendship, but he finds little. Despite his desperate situation, Baton remains vain and unsympathetic, a Bovian antihero to the core. Bove himself called My Friends, published in France in 1923, a novel of impoverished solitude.” The book, his first novel, drew praise from such writers as Rilke, Gide, and Beckett and is to this day the author's most celebrated work.