“The Fire Within is an existential novel that stands with Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’s The Fall as one the great summations of the human soul under the alienating conditions of twentieth-century capitalist society.”
—Will Self, from his introduction
THE FIRE WITHIN
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Translated from the French by Richard Howard
Introduction by Will Self
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. 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.
“The Fire Within is Drieu’s best book, if you ask me. In it he’s working quickly. He’s in a hurry. Death’s breathing down his neck and over the pages of his novel, briskly sweeping away all digression.”
—Bernard Frank
