The Fire Within

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By Pierre Drieu La Rochelle & Richard Howard &

Publisher Description

Adapted to film by both Louis Malle and Joachim Trier, this heart-rending and tenderly wrought novel narrates the decline of an artist and heroin addict in 1920s Paris.

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle might be said to be both the Hemingway and the Fitzgerald of twentieth-century French literature, a battle-scarred veteran of the First World War whose work chronicles the trials and tribulations of a lost generation, a man about town, a heartbreaker with a broken heart, a literary stylist whose work is as tough as it is lyrical and polished. Politically compromised as Drieu came to be by his affiliation with the fascist right and collaboration under Nazi occupation—Drieu committed suicide at the end of the war—his novels remain vivid reflections of a broken spiritual and political world of the interwar years and as works of art, and to this day they are widely read and greatly admired in France.

The Fire Within, which has been successfully adapted to the screen by Louis Malle and more recently Joachim Trier, is the lacerating tale of Alain Leroy, a war veteran and beautiful young man of whom the world is expected but who has taken refuge from the world in drugs. After being institutionalized, Alain emerges to try to put his life together again, but in spite of the attentions of friends and lovers, he struggles to find his way.

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4 Reviews

4.0

Laura

Created 7 months ago

troddk

Created 8 months ago

Colton

Created about 1 year ago

Adam F

Created about 1 year ago

“"He stood there, the cigarette scorching his lips, without a single resource, either inside or outside himself." What is it like to feel completely and utterly lost and defeated caught in the cunning grip of drug addiction? Like the walking dead with nothing internally or externally to rely on. Looking for anwers and not sure which one is feasible or practical. "Yes, gratitude's something. But you know, from there to love is still a long way... And besides, even when we really have love in our hearts, will that hold people?" The Fire Within tells the stark tale of WWI veteran Alain who is a man lost in his drug addled existence in 1930s Paris. The book is not so much about the cause of his trauma or use of drugs, as it is about the psyche of an addict nearing death as he wanders in desperation for ways and means to find and use more. This is not a book about war. This is not a book that glamourizes drug use. Reading this book, I got some heavy gothic vibes. Maybe it was the mentions of opium or that the anguished egotistical nature of Alain reminded me of a junkie version of Dorian Gray. During his days, Alain visits people who are willing to help, not able to help or who have completely given up on him. What makes this book a special breed amongst novels about addiction is the fact that Drieu la Rochelle writes about Alain not only with compassion or humanity, but also with the idea that the addict is also a human having an existential crisis. It is this quality that makes The Fire Within a special book. Alain contemplates more than just his use of drugs. He wonders about his relationships with people and other symbols. He ponders the philosophy of money about love and happiness. "It was all simple and solid, and made Alain realize each time he came that there was something of his character or his environment that deprived him of forever: the ability to accept life firmly and frankly." Pierre Drieu la Rochelle is new to me French writer and thanks to NYRB for introducing me to one of his novels. The Fire Within is a piece of French existentialist literature that is balanced between the beautiful and the bleakness that comes from the mind of an addict. Not all those who seek to stop find recovery. Addiction is a cunning enemy of life and Drieu la Rochelle's writing, was tense and tender and I will be sure to seek out his other works. "This room, too, had no way out; it was his private eternity. For years he had had no home, and yet he had his place in this ideal prison which remade itself for him every evening, wherever he was. His chambered anxiety was here, like a little box inside a larger one. A mirror, a window, a door. The door and the window opened onto nothing. The mirror opened only onto himself." "She believed that action was the way to settle everything." "He was genuinely sorry. She believed it, for no man was so attentive as Alain to all the little ceremonies of feeling." "Money epitomizing the universe for him was in its turn epitomized by drugs. Money, outside the meticulous garment of his hotel room, was the night." "A terrible shudder seized the pit of his loins, the marrow of his bones, and ran like icy lightning from his feet to his head: death was an absolute presence. This was solitude; he had threatened life with it as a knife, and now that knife had turned and was piercing his entrails. There was no one left, no hope left. An irreparable isolation." "Would he not realize that it had been wrong to give up, to declare, without having ever really looked, at the world as nothing, that it has no substance?" "You think that you and drugs are the same thing, but after all, you don't really know. It's like a foreign body. There's Alain, and then ... Alain. Alain can change. Why do you want to keep the first skin you were born with? [...] Once you choose to be what you are today; you can stop being that and still be yourself, but in another way. I know you want to be a lot of things." "For a long time now psychology hasn't been enough for me; what I like about people isn't so much their passions but what comes out of their passions, something just as strong - ideas, gods. Gods are born with men and die with men, but those tangled tribes are part of eternity." "Had there not always been men who denied life? Was this a weakness or a strength? Perhaps there was a great deal of life in Alain's rejection of life? For him it was a means of denying and condemning not life itself, but the aspects that he hated." "Despair is one thing, drugs are another. Despair is an idea, drugs are a practice. A practice that scares us so much that we hope against hope to cure ourselves." "I've always felt I was in this world and in another." "A night is a winding road that must be followed from one end to the other." "Suicide is the resource of men whose springs have been devoured by rust, the springs of the quotidian. They were born for action, but they put it off; and then the action comes to them on the pendulum's return. Suicide is an act, an act of those who are unable to perform any other. It is an act of faith, like all acts. Faith in a fellow creature, in the existence of others, in the reality of relations between the self and other selves." "But to take that path was to fall back into the mystical protest, into the adoration of death. Addicts are the mystics of a materialist age who, no longer having the strength to animate objects, to sublimate them into symbols, undertake a converse labor of reduction-eroding them, wearing them down until the kernel of nothingness within each appears. Addicts offer sacrifices to a symbolism of shadows to combat a fetishism of the sun-they loathe the sun because it hurts their tired eyes." "All of us, in one way or another, have the feeling that we can't put the best of ourselves, our brightest spark, into our everyday life, but that at the same time it's not wholly lost. Don't you feel that way? The impulse that wells up in us and that seems stifled by life isn't lost; it accumulates somewhere. It forms an indestructible reserve which won't vanish the day our flesh fails, and which guarantees us a mysterious life." "Alain walked without looking at anything, as he had always done... And yet the avenue was beautiful, like a broad shining river that rolls in majestic peace between the feet of the elephant god. But his eyes were fixed on the little world he had left forever."”

About Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945) was a French writer of novels, short stories, and political essays. His work was marked by his experience as a soldier during World War I. After the war, as the director of the Nouvelle Revue Française, he became a leading figure of cultural collaboration with the Nazis during France’s occupation. After the liberation of Paris, Drieu went into hiding and committed suicide. Two novels, The Fire Within (1931) and Gilles (1939), are his most enduring works.

Richard Howard (1929–2022) was the author of numerous volumes of poetry and the translator of more than one hundred fifty titles from the French, including, for New York Review Books, Marc Fumaroli’s When the World Spoke French, Honoré de Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, and Guy de Maupassant’s Alien Hearts. He received a National Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.

Will Self is a journalist, columnist, and author of more than two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including eleven novels. His most recent book is the collection Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021.