Franz e Pierre si conoscono a Montparnasse nel 1906 e tra i due nasce subito una profonda amicizia caratterizzata da lunghe conversazioni sulla letteratura, la pittura e le donne. Nel 1910 compiono un viaggio in Sicilia e in Grecia, dove rimangono piacevolmente colpiti da un gruppo scultoreo raffigurante un giovane che solleva una ragazza, il cui sorriso, crudele ed enigmatico, cambierà le loro vite. Nell'autunno del 1912 arrivano a Parigi per studiare con Maurice Denis tre pittrici berlinesi tra cui Helen Grund, giovane che possiede lo stesso sorriso misterioso della statua greca. Helen e Franz cominciano a frequentarsi e nel 1913 fanno ritorno in Germania dove si sposano.

Lo scoppio della Prima guerra mondiale separa gli amici fino al 1920, quando Pierre, tornato dagli Stati Uniti, fa visita a Franz e Helen nello châlet che gli Hessel possiedono nei dintorni di Monaco di Baviera. La guerra non ha cambiato il rapporto tra Franz e Pierre, ma ha intaccato quello tra i coniugi Hessel; è durante questa visita che Roché inizia una relazione con la moglie dell'amico, e con il suo consenso.

Nella casa si ha la sensazione di vivere qualcosa di straordinario. Pierre, che dal 1901 annota sui suoi taccuini tutto ciò che gli accade, pensa di raccontare quello che i tre amici stanno vivendo considerandone i rispettivi punti di vista. Franz decide di non aderire al progetto, mentre Helen ne è entusiasta. Nonostante al suo ritorno in Francia Pierre riceva da Helen pagine del suo diario, il progetto viene accantonato; sarà ripreso solo a partire dal 1941, quando l'occupazione tedesca e la morte dell'amico convincono Pierre a rendere omaggio a Franz dedicandogli un romanzo. Hessel, di origine ebrea, era deceduto a seguito dell'internamento in un campo del sud della Francia, dove si era rifugiato con la famiglia per sfuggire alla persecuzione nazista.

The film is so beautiful, and so iconic, that the book was almost bound to be a disappointment. As with Deux anglaises..., Truffaut improved the story considerably in tightening it up to fit within his medium. He certainly seems to have lifted the best of Roché's prose.

In the book, the sequence of apparently arbitrary, haphazard scenes covering something like twenty years in the lives of the main characters only slowly starts to take shape as a constructed narrative. It isn't easy to work out how much this is a deliberate literary device, and how much it is simply Roché sticking in assorted scenes from real life and then tweaking them a bit to fit the storyline. The back-and-forth between Jim and Kathe in the second half of the book does seem to go on for far too long, somehow. Many of the episodes don't add to our understanding of the characters at all, but just reinforce what we already know about them. On the other hand, the novel is only a little over 200 pages long - it obviously says something about the economy of Roché's style that he manages to present so many scenes in such a short space.

As others have said, Jules remains something of an enigma. Jim seems to be the main viewpoint character, with Jules always a rather passive figure in the background. As we get to the end of the book, it starts to appear as though it is Jules who is telling us the story, putting himself in Jim's position, but this is never quite made clear. And there are other odd silences. The First World War, with Jules and Jim fighting on opposite sides, is dismissed in a couple of sentences. Jules is a Jewish, German writer, living in Paris, with property and investments in Germany. All of these facts are explicitly presented to us in the text. They would clearly have had a big effect on what happened to him between the late twenties, when the story ends, and the late fifties, when Roché wrote it. But we are told nothing at all about this. Why does Roché set this up in our minds but not use it?

The really big silence in the text, of course, is the nature of the relationship between Jules and Jim. Are they just friends who happen to share a series of women? Are they in love with each other without knowing it? Are we supposed to assume that they have a sexual relationship we're not told about? The only hint we get is one very suggestive sentence: "Il jouissait du bon cigare de Jules bien plus que du sien." (pt.III, ch.III). This can't be accidental, but it might just be a deliberate tease for the overanalytical reader: Roché doesn't seem to be the sort of writer to miss out on the shock value of a salacious plot point, so I think he would have told us about it in so many words if Jules and Jim had had a sexual relationship.

Having read both his novels (and seen what Truffaut managed to do with them), I think my conclusion would be that Roché was a good writer, but not a particularly good novelist. His prose style is very agreeable to read, especially in small doses, and it is interesting to read his take on the early years of the century from the perspective of old age (especially from a writer who had lived through the whole modernist movement before he wrote his first novel!), but his characters remain infuriatingly pig-headed. It is curious too, how he can write two rather similar stories, but arbitrarily give one a tragic ending and the other a comic one. Are we supposed to conclude that that goes with a fundamental difference between a man loved by two women and a woman loved by two men? ( )

This is the book from which François Truffaut made his iconic film. It's the story of two friends, Jules and Jim, who both love Kate, who marries Jules, divorces him to marry Jim, but doesn't, and goes back to Jules, but continues her affair with Jim, not to mention other men. She's basically a selfish, self-centered woman, and it's hard to see why they love her. One can understand, perhaps the initial attraction, but these relationships span the period from 1907 until well into the '30s, when they're old enough to know better!

So it's a curious book, and I liked the laconic style - short sentences, short chapters. Yet one never feels one knows or understands the protagonists, and Kate is positively unlikable.

(I read it in translation, which, for the most part, seemed good. But there's one extended section involving a Nordic woman named Odile in which, to show that she did not speak French well, the translator has her speaking in a rather annoying pidgin (the author?translator?'s word). "Many them at café want teach me. Me no want." Now, I have no idea whether that's a decent translation of how a Scandinavian who didn't speak much French would torture the syntax, but it was irksome.)

Beautifully written, but despite that, I can't overcome the fact that I cannot understand the characters and this leads directly to the lack of sympathy for any of them. The characters are left vague and there's no hints to explain their actions or moods - which is exactly how it is with most of the people you meet and never get to know properly. To put it short: I liked the atmosphere created in the book but it wasn't enough to carry through the whole book. ( )