A finely wrought novel of a sixteen-year-old boy's initiation into love by a woman twice his age, this work has been hailed both here and in the author's native France as the revelation of an outstanding new talent. With an amazing maturity for his twenty-two years, the author examines every fleeting phase of adolescent love, in a manner reminiscent of Radiguet's now classic Devil in the Flesh. Not satisfied simply to experience love, the narrator strives constantly, and often desperately, to transfix each new emotion, each new moment of tenderness, anguish, physical passion, despair. Through the alchemy of his often brilliant prose Sollers has attempted to recreate this experience fully, from the awkward impatience of youth to the final dissolution of love into a new awareness of man's strange but inviolable solitude.
