Leçons de style Book

A meditation on the fate of a young-ish man who comes into an inheritance that enables him to live a leisurely life in Paris. Even though he constantly intends to look up friends and stay involved after he quits his miserable job, he never acts on his intentions and instead drifts into a not unpleasant life of dining at the same restaurant every day, drinking copious quantities of brandy and wine, and sleeping his life away mostly. Some things do happen to him; he does get involved with a woman. Perhaps he was trying to recapture the love he had with a co-worker who left him for another co-worker who had an aggressive and alluring line regarding how he was going to make it and so forth. Here's what the author says about love on page 8: "...love can move mountains, love can burst all bonds, even steel; nothing can stand in its way, as we all know. It's our own mediocrity that makes us let go of love, makes us renounce it. True Love doesn't know the meaning of renunciation, is not even aware of that problem, never resigns itself; resignation is for beaten people, as beaten paths are for beaten men."

The subject of the book thinks about reality, about time, about the reality or unreality of his own existence. Historic events overtake him -he is caught up unwillingly in a revolutionary spasm, to the extent that he's struck at the restaurant by a revolutionist. After his neighborhood is mostly ruined by the opposing sides in the conflict, and his restaurant is closed down, he begins to live mostly in his apartment and then mostly in his bedroom. He does survive the revolution as does his money. But by then, his life has become a contemplation of the sky outside his window, and he's an old man.

The final scene is a both beautiful and touching - as he achieves either a spiritual epiphany or he sees a visual representation of heaven as he is dying. Maybe this was the image he was always hoping to see - and he could only achieve it by focusing only on that patch of sky for years, maybe that scene - undoubtedly only visible to him - was the truth, the view through the prison he thought the world was in, to the outer light-filled region of the universe that is inaccessible to man.