Elisabeth

Witty banter, lust, ennui, and an undercurrent of violence underlie a seemingly paradisiacal summer on the eve of World War II, in this landmark translation of the first and only novel by ric Rohmer, the French New Waves most prolific and beloved filmmaker.Fifteen years before completing his first feature filmand ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at the journal Cahiers du cinma that would usher French cinema into a new erathe man who would become famous as ric Rohmer published a single novel. Released by ditions Gallimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Margurite Duras, lisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the nouveau romanand was also the matrix, as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.Set in the sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer, lisabeth is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and lie to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already presentas it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peacetheir restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonieswith the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.