Jules and Jim

by Henri-Pierre Roché

Jules arrives from Austria in belle poque Paris, where he is befriended by Jim. Together they embark upon a riotously Bohemian life, full of gaiety, color and bustle. And then there is Kate, the enigmatic German girl with the mysterious smile.

Capricious, untamed and curiously innocent, Kate steals their hearts in turn, and so begins the moving and tender story of three people in love, with each other and with life. Francois Truffaut, whose film of the novel is one of cinema's greatest achievments, has called Jules et Jim "a perfect hymn to love."

Henri-Pierre Roch devoted his life to the arts, numbering Duchamp, Brancusi, Braque, Satie and Picasso amongst his closest friends. Jules et Jim, an autobiographical novel, was originally published in France in 1953 and was followed by Deux Anglaises et le Continent, which Truffaut also made into a film.

"A delightful account of people sharing and unsharing each other."?Times Literary Supplement

Genres: Fiction, France, Classics, French Literature, Romance, 20th Century, Literary Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA RIVOLUZIONE SESSUALE


Helen Grund, la vera Kathe.

La rivoluzione sessuale di Wilhelm Reich è stato uno dei libri fondamentali dei miei anni verdi, quelli formativi.
Ho sempre pensato che qualsiasi rivoluzione, qualsiasi radicale cambiamento politico ed economico dovesse prima passare per la piena libertà, e piena accettazione e comprensione e apertura e accoglienza e tolleranza e eccetera, della sessualità di ciascuno, etero o omo, mono o poli, bi o astinenza, onanismo incluso e quant’altro.
Questo romanzo andava in quella direzione: la sua storia è quella di una meravigliosa geometria dell’amore, un amore puro a tre, il famoso triangolo, che qui trova la sua bibbia, il suo paradigma.


Franz Hessel, il vero Jules.

Ma a prescindere da quest’aspetto, che comunque per me all’epoca (ma anche ora) era musica per le orecchie, a prescindere da ciò, Jules et Jim di Henri-Pierre Roché è un bel romanzo, proprio un bel libro.
Che uscì negli anni Cinquanta (1953), debutto nella narrativa del suo autore ormai settantaquattrenne, ambientato nel periodo della Grande Guerra, prima, e dopo.


Henri-Pierre Roché, il vero “alto e magro” Jim.

Lascio parlare François Truffaut che ne ha scritto parole intelligenti e belle:
Jules e Jim è un romanzo d'amore in stile telegrafico, scritto da un poeta che si sforza di far dimenticare la sua cultura e che allinea le parole e i pensieri come farebbe un contadino laconico e concreto. Leggendo Jules e Jim ebbi la sensazione di trovarmi di fronte un esempio di ciò che il cinema non riusciva mai a fare: mostrare due uomini che amano la stessa donna senza che il pubblico possa fare una scelta affettiva tra questi personaggi, tanto si trova costretto ad amarli tutti e tre nella stessa misura. Ecco l'elemento, anti-selettivo, che mi toccò di più in questa storia.



Jim è francese, Jules austriaco, sono molto amici. Quando Kathe entra nella loro vita è impossibile non innamorarsi: è Jules a reagire per primo, e Jim lascia strada all’amico. Jules e Kathe si sposeranno. Dopo la guerra, Jim riappare e la storia tra lui e Kathe non può più essere allontanata. L’epilogo è straziante.



Roché scrive a capitoli brevi composti da frasi brevi: il tutto genera quell’effetto “telegrafico” di cui parla Truffaut.
Ne scaturisce una straordinaria semplicità di linguaggio che, nonostante l’argomento di primo acchito urticante, sprigiona innocenza e candore d’umori, purezza e pudore di sentimenti: paradossalmente, giunge a conseguire effetti di grande preziosità e raffinatezza (la poesia di cui parla Truffaut).
È come guardare un quadro impressionista dove al posto delle pennellate sono fuggenti annotazioni, una costruzione a primo impatto dispersiva, dove si accumulano dettagli e appunti fugaci. Un mosaico esistenziale.



E quindi, poi, il film. Un capolavoro che farebbe scomparire il libro se il libro non fosse a sua volta molto bello.
Truffaut lesse il romanzo nel 1955 e se innamorò. Cominciò a collaborare con Roché al quale chiedeva dialoghi. Solo che Truffaut doveva ancora debuttare alla regia, e quel momento avvenne nel 1959 con quell’altro capolavoro, I quattrocento colpi, inizio della saga di Antoine Doinel. Il meraviglioso Jules et Jim fu la sua terza regia, e per questa dovette aspettare fino al 1962. Purtroppo Roché era morto già da tre anni.
Ancora per parola di Truffaut un appunto sul film:
consiste non già nel fondere intimamente il libro con ciò che gli si vuole aggiungere, ma nel far alternare brutalmente una scena tratta con grande fedeltà dal libro, dunque assai letteraria, assai scritta, con una scena inventata, molto realistica, molto dialogata. Si tratta di restituire la parola al libro e di riprenderla di quando in quando.



E quindi, contraddicendo il re dei sorcini, il triangolo sì, io l’avevo considerato.

PS
Helen Grund Hessel scrisse a François Truffaut:
Sono, a 75 anni, ciò che resta di Kathe, la temibile eroina del romanzo di Pierre Roché, “Jules e Jim.” Può immaginare la curiosità con cui ho atteso il momento di vedere il suo film sullo schermo. Il 24 gennaio sono corsa al cinema. Seduta in quella sala scura, temendo somiglianze camuffate o paralleli più o meno irritanti, sono stata molto presto afferrata dal potere magico, il suo e quello di Jeanne Moreau, di resuscitare ciò che è stato vissuto ciecamente. Che Pierre Roché abbia saputo raccontare la storia di noi tre tenendosi sempre molto vicino al susseguirsi degli eventi, non ha nulla di miracoloso. Ma quale disposizione d'animo in lei, quale affinità ha potuto illuminarla fino al punto di rendere sensibile l'essenziale delle nostre intime emozioni? Da questo punto di vista, io sono il suo unico autentico giudice, perché gli altri due testimoni, Pierre e Franz, non sono più qui per poterle dire il loro 'sì'. Con affetto, caro signor Truffaut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjJqH...
Le tourbillon

PS
Nel 1956 Henri-Pierre Roché pubblica il suo secondo romanzo, Le due inglesi e il continente, storia di due sorelle che s’innamorano dello stesso uomo. Nel 1971 Truffaut ne trasse il suo film, conservando il titolo originale.

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jules (short, German, philosophical) and Jim (tall, French, romantic) meet in 1907 and immediately become best friends. People wonder if they're gay, but they're not: they just really like each other. They always seem to end up dating the same women, and live a wild and complicated life. After a while, they both fall for beautiful German Kathe, who's the original psycho bitch from hell. She hangs out with each of them in turn, has children with them, falls into fits of jealous rage and abandons them for third parties, forgives them and then does even crazier things.

Many of the reviewers here seem to be appalled by Kathe's behavior, and even more by the fact that the two guys put up with it. With all due respect, I think this is to miss the point, which is all in the extremely unusual style. The author, a luminary of the French art scene who probably appears briefly in Midnight in Paris at some point, based the novel partly on his own life. He started writing it when he was 64, and took nearly ten years to get it right; he wanted to make it as simple and unaffected as possible and just tell the story. He succeeds very well. The fact that he has nearly succeeded in removing anger and heartbreak from the narrative voice doesn't mean that the characters weren't angry and heartbroken at the time. Quite the contrary. But he isn't angry any more. He's viewing it all from a vast distance, and the dominant emotion is nostalgia.

I was reminded of the scene near the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being where she finds the old photographs tucked away at the back of the drawer. At the time, there was all that pain and jealousy, but now she thinks back on it and wonders how they could have failed to understand how happy they were. Or, another association that occurred to me, I imagine Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine telling the story to Abigail Breslin, his beloved granddaughter:

- So what did she do then, Grandpa?

- She went off without a word and spent the night with her old flame Harold, sweetheart.

- Weren't you mad at her?

- I certainly was! But she came back next morning.

- And what did she say?

- She said she'd had fun, but it was all a mistake.

- Did you forgive her?

- Sweetheart, I always forgave Kathe. She was a very special lady, God rest her soul.

- I love hearing stories about you and Kathe, Grandpa.

- Just promise me one thing, sweetheart. Don't be like her when you grow up. I'm not sure the world can handle another Kathe.

- I promise, Grandpa.

- That's my girl.

Readers who are currently involved with psycho bitches of either sex may find Henri-Pierre Roché's novel comforting. If you're lucky, you'll feel this way about your psycho bitch when you've had enough time to think about it properly.

__________________________________

We just watched the Truffaut movie of Deux Anglaises Et Le Continent , Roché's second and last book, and that does throw an unexpected new light on Jules et Jim. The basic story is similar: the central character, male, toys callously with the affections of two English sisters and things end up with one of them dead. Towards the end of the movie, the guy writes a novel called Julien et Jerôme, which he says explicitly is their story with the genders reversed.

So, the implication is that Deux Anglaises Et Le Continent is the true story, and Roché himself is the psycho bitch. Or maybe he's just messing with our minds the second time round, since the received wisdom appears to be that Jules et Jim IS in fact the autobiographical novel.

Can a better informed person tell me what's going on here? It seems to be a moderately interesting literary mystery.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Menage a Quatre

At the heart of this novel is a menage a trois between two men (Jules and Jim) and various successive women (Lucie and Kate).

It's told in the third person, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Jules (no, Jim, no, Jules, no, Jim) is the implied author. We get a fair amount of insight into each of the participants, which differentiates the novel from the likes of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" (which still occurs very much inside one or other of the males' heads). In a way, it's like getting a novel, parts of which have been written by both Miller and Anais Nin.

As late as page 127, Jules says to Jim and Kate:

"If you both wrote the story of your relationship - but wrote it separately and fully, you from your own irreducible point of view, Kate, and you from yours, Jim, and published them together, it would make a very unusual book."

This is not quite the novel we get, because we also get Jules' perspective. However, we learn so much of the point of view of all three, that the experience of the reader is akin to being the fourth person in a menage a trois (or the fifth person in a menage a quatre). You can look, but you better not touch. After a while it ceases to be fun, notwithstanding the voyeurism.

Beats Me

For all the insight we get into the women, we still hear the strong and controlling Kate sigh, "At last a man who beats me when I deserve it. You do love me, Jim!" This doesn't strike me as credible in any time or place. Perhaps you can convince me otherwise? Feel free to leave a note in the comments section below.

This triangular relationship always seems to be on the brink of tempestuous violence. Each coupling is "tormented by love and jealousy...[or] love and indifference." When Kate returns from a secret night-time liaison with a boxer, "Jim thought of hitting her, but had neither the strength nor the will-power." (You have to wonder about the consequences had Jim either the strength or the will-power.) Kate, for her part, "wound up by saying that he [Jim] had made a fool of her, and that the only thing she wanted now was to get back to the tender, generous protection of Jules."

Circles

By about halfway through, the story seems to have exhausted its potential and starts to go around in circles. Jealousy has become the measure of love, so that if one lover is not jealous of another's lover, then they don't love the other enough. Worse still, the characters distress and irritate each other, not to mention the reader. You could almost smack them or bang their heads together, if you had the strength or will-power.

Warfare

You wonder whether you should put the book aside, but you continue to read, hoping against hope (like the protagonists) that things will improve. Or get worse, so that you can at least enjoy it for the "sheer beauty of the duel." (There is a Chekhovian revolver that begs to be used!) Jim says of Kate:

"Maybe she's got to have warfare all the time, but I can't take it any more."

You start to develop favourites, affinities with one lover rather than another (Truffaut argues the opposite in the name of anti-selectivism). You almost believe it when Kate says, "I was trying to find you in it all, Jim."

Perhaps, after all, this is the type of story that would make a better film than a novel. But that's probably because few readers could believe it might actually have happened. Film is better able to convince us of its verisimilitude.

See Manny's review and thread (see also message #9 below) for a deeper exploration of the story.

[Noce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amore in fricassea
2 è il numero di volte che ho letto il libro.

∞ è il numero di volte che ho visto e adorato il film.

Con questi presupposti, adesso vorrei tanto che voi mi spieghiate la panzana che spesso leggo nelle recensioni altrui, sul fatto che dovrebbe trattarsi di una storia d’amore. No davvero! Spiegatemelo, perché io proprio non ci arrivo. O meglio, da qualche parte arrivo, ma è tutto un altro approdo.

Partiamo dal principio. Jules e Jim, come i più informati di voi sapranno, è un’opera che ha goduto di una fortuna insperata, quasi esclusivamente grazie a Truffaut, che decise di farne un film.

Ma Truffaut, prima ancora di mettere su pellicola la storia del triangolo provenzale più famoso dell’epoca, era innanzitutto un grande amico di Roché. Avrei detto grandissimo, se non fosse che la prematura morte dell’autore impedì l’evolversi di questa stima affettuosa e reciproca. A sua volta, non si può tacere sul fatto che Henri-Pierre Roché, prima ancora di essere la mente del romanzo, era un dandy parigino, amante del collezionismo. Collezionismo di opere d’arte, ma anche di donne. E di questa cosa ne andava così orgoglioso, che teneva addirittura un “diario di bordo-letto” al fine di aver contezza di tutte le sue conquiste. La storia di Jules e Jim, non è quindi un racconto di fantasia, ma una delle storie di quel diario. Ovviamente una delle più importanti. E siccome lui era il figo della situescion, inutile dire che lo si può riconoscere nel forte Jim.

Messa così, l’origine della storia spiega anche quel tono didascalico del romanzo, che a molti può sembrare un po’-troppo-trattato-di-botanica, e che per chi ha visto il film, è inscindibile dalla voce di Nando Gazzolo, voce narrante della vicenda.

Ma il punto è un altro. Sia che si parli del libro o del film, la conclusione è una, ammessa da Truffaut, e dallo stesso Roché. Trattasi della storia di un’indissolubile amicizia tra uomini. Non la storia di un amore libertino, terra promessa, dove crescono i nostri pensieri, e le utopie dei maschi galletti. Non la storia di una donna che ama due uomini, ma di due uomini che condividono tutto, dalla A di amante alla Z di zavorra (ché le storie così, qualche problemino collaterale lo creano sempre). Il tutto su uno sfondo bucolico, dove una donna molto “sportiva” e dal rampante egoismo (di cui in effetti non si può non rimanere affascinati), campeggia credendo di tener soggiogati due polli, mentre non sa, o non vuole vedere che è la sola amicizia tra i due che rende possibile il ménage a trois.

Quindi: che Kate stia sul gargarozzo a tutti, è giusto. Dev’essere così. Perché la sua funzione è principalmente quella di agire da controspinta, per evidenziare l’unico sentimento autentico presente nella storia. Quello tra Jules e Jim.

In conclusione, tanto di cappello a Truffaut, perché se la lucertola è la sintesi del coccodrillo, il film di Truffaut è la sintesi certosina della storia di Roché, filtrata, raffinata e depurata dal carosello (a volte estenuante) di innumerevoli visi femminili presenti nel romanzo. E poi, ultima considerazione, ma non per importanza, ciò che lascia questa storia è l’amara consapevolezza che se da un lato è difficile, che nella realtà possa trovare concretezza, senza logorarsi e ingoiare i protagonisti nel vortice della gelosia, è praticamente impossibile possa accadere all’inverso. Cioè un triangolo tra due donne e un uomo. La competizione femminile è talmente forte che non c’è amicizia che tenga, davanti alla conquista dell’oggetto amato. Insomma, diciamocelo pure, di donne emancipate e libertine per convinzione come Kate, ce ne sono veramente pochissime. Tutte le altre sono Otelle. Ecco, in questa cosa, nella complicità fraterna e goliardica, gli uomini sono anni luce avanti a noi. E, a parer mio, è anche giusto così in fondo. È lo sforzo per compensare le diversità, che spesso traduce le unioni in amori riusciti. (Chiedo venia in anticipo per la chiosa stile-saggezza di Nonna Papera).

E buona gelosia a tutti!

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's remarkable to think that Henri-Pierre Roché wrote this, his first novel, in his mid 70s.
He certainly weaves his ecstatic parable with the gusto of a much younger writer, but when compared to François Truffaut's nouvelle vague film, which will forever stay wrapped around my heart, the book doesn't even come close. Still, I've read worse depictions of friendship, love and desire than here. Three stars feels about right.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 5 out of 5]

They all laughed.
Time was flowing, flowing ... Happiness isn’t easy to record. And it wears out; and nobody notices ...



If there ever was an obscure book in need of salvation from oblivion, I cannot think of a better example than this slim volume, a first novel written by a septuagenarian. Or think of a better saviour than a young Francois Truffaut, who found it in a second hand bookstore discount bin, recognized its worth and turned it into a cult movie with Jeanne Moreau as the muse who inspires two young artists to live and love as free as the birds.

The archaic smile, at once innocent and cruel, appeared on her lips at any time when her face was relaxed: it was natural to her, it expressed the essential Kate.

What is this archaic smile that is used by Henry-Pierre Roche as the foundation stone of his semi-autobiographical novel? Who is this Kate, who isn’t even featured in the early chapters of the book describing the meeting and instant friendship between shy poet Jules and bon-viveur writer Jim in Paris at the turn of the century?

It was about the year 1907 ... and the Bal des Quat-z’ Arts ...
The friendship grew during the ball, which Jules took in serenely, his eyes round with wonder and brimming with humour and tenderness.

The Ball of the Four Arts was a costumed revelry organized by Parisian students in Montmartre, infamous for nudity and licentious behaviour. Jules, who left behind in his home country a girl named Lucie for whom he felt a pure, spiritual love, is now learning from Jim about the wild girls of the city of light. Together, the friends meet, seduce, betray, exchange and laugh their way towards an ideal love neither Jules nor Jim can define until they take a trip to an island in the Adriatic, where a recently discovered statue of a goddess awaits them:

They lingered round the goddess in silence, gazing at her from different angles; her smile was a floating presence, powerful, youthful, thirsty for kisses and perhaps for blood.
They didn’t mention her to each other till the next day. Had they ever met such a smile? Never. What would they do if they did meet it one day? Follow it.

Jules and Jim return to Paris with a renewed sense of purpose in their quest for true love, ... feeling sure that the divine was within human reach. , and indeed they come across a young woman named Kate who appears to hold within her the very essence of that ancient goddess.
Kate is wild, passionate, unpredictable and often cruel – more than a match for the two libertine writers. She marries Jules after a missed encounter with Jim. Soon afterwards the first world war separates them on different sides in the conflict, but their friendship is strong enough to bring them back together afterwards, when this triangle of love is constantly shifting its point of focus from Jules to Kate to Jim and back to Jules

Life really was a holiday.



(a deliberate recreation by Truffaut of the famous tableaux by Manet ‘Le dejeuner sur l’herbe’?)

The story follows the three friends through decades of laughter, passion, tears and separations. I could map out the dynamic of their relationship but I feel it is less relevant than the philosophy, the wisdom that is hard won in these battles of the heart.

‘Don’t cause unhappiness, Jim ...’

A fine aspiration, but is it even possible to love and not hurt the person you love when the heart is an organ of fire , as Michael Ondaatje exclaims in a different novel? The passive Jules gives back to Kate her freedom when he realizes she feels imprisoned by their marriage, but he cannot take back his heart that she has in her keeping:

Jules told Kate, ‘I don’t like being called a saint. A saint is someone you can load up like a donkey. No, I am not a saint! But what else can I do?

In an earlier relationship, Jules already demonstrates that he is able to practice the freedom he preaches:

He was jealous of this Russian, but he left Odile* as free as he himself wanted to be. That was part of the reason why she kept on coming back to him.

* I saved some Odile gold nuggets, because she was an early highlight in the pre-Kate Parisian adventures of the two friends

Kate is a woman who follows her own code in love and fidelity, one that gives herself completely to the present but holds no promises for the future. She is also jealous without holding herself to the same moral standard. It may sound cruel and illogical, but I have actually met my own incarnation of this fickle goddess:

In her mind, each lover was a separate world, and what happened in one world was no concern of the others. But this didn’t prevent her from being jealous herself.

Jim himself is no stranger to the concept of a divided heart, keeping in a secret apartment in Paris an old friend with benefits named Gilberte, an oasis of tranquility and stability in the aftermath of another tempestuous episode with Kate:

As compared with the frozen mountains, the burning plains, the thunderstorms and typhoons of Kate’s love, Gilberte presented a level, delicate landscape with a temperate climate, in which the light of the sky was the sum of total events. Jim had never been deprived of her and had never felt that she made any demand on him.

Coming back to the first axiom of love, according to Roche, I believe the argument here is one of intent rather than one of results. You can strive to keep the loved ones from hurt but, in the end, pain is unavoidable. All we can do is to be true to our hearts and, hopefully, learn from the experience. Wise words from a septuagenarian libertine who lived his life for pleasure and managed somehow to speak across generations about the lessons he learned:

‘As soon as Jim wants to do anything,’ said Jules, ‘and to the extent that he doesn’t think it will hurt anybody else (he could be wrong there, though), he does it, for the pleasure and because he wants to learn something from the experience. He hopes that one day he’ll achieve wisdom.’

>>><<<>>><<<

Jules et Jim is an epoch; it is also a quest. That of harmonious love, kind, free, selfless and passionate, a pioneering love which keeps reinventing itself. *

* from the introduction by Agnès Catherine Poirier

[image error]

As a late bloomer who just missed the Flower Power generation but discovered Truffaut as a student with this very film, I think I can say now, decades later, that it has had an influence on the way I look at love, at fidelity, at heartache. It’s not about the promiscuity, but about the freedom: to be yourself, to love, to accept the inevitable changes of the heart.
Odile, the Scandinavian exchange student of the arts who I hoped to make a mention of even as she is eclipsed by the volcanic personality of Kate, had this to say in her pidgin French:

Me no understand life men women here. Be opposite to my country. Them here make love when want. This important. Me want learn here.’

This attitude was probably scandalous in 1907, when the bourgeois society was condemning the excesses of the Bal de Quat-z’Arts in Place Pigalle. It was frowned upon in 1968 when a new generation of students demanded to be allowed to live their lives as they pleased and not as their elders demanded. It surely will get banned even today by the resurgence in fake puritan morals on the right.

‘Middle class women of town not pretty, jealous because husbands look at me. They say, put gipsy in prison.’

I guess I am myself a gipsy at heart, because I keep cheering for the Kates, for the Odiles, for the Jules and the Jims of each generation to defy the conventions and to come running full tilt at life, regardless of what gets broken.

They weren’t reasonable people.

and, They hadn’t an instant of life to lose.

>>><<<>>><<<

Henry-Pierre Roche was a sophisticated aesthete, a friend of Picasso, Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp and many others at a time when Paris was revolutionizing art. He used his own memories to portray Jim and based Jules on his friend Franz Hessel. Their friendship, as described in the novel, is real and documented, as is the woman named Kate in the book who inspired them. Yet, these piquant details seem less relevant than the fact that the author waited so many years to put his words on paper.
Time worked its magic for Roche, burning up the unessential and leaving behind the important facts, the ones that don’t need fancy words or stylistic arabesques to convey meaning. The poet will take the memories and distil them until only the perfume remains.
This is what the rest of my notes on the novel contain, although I am sure a reader can quote just as easily whole chapters of the story.
This is what Francois Truffaut realized as he worked on his script for the adaptation of Jules et Jim to the silver screen:

Jules et Jim is a novel about love in telegraphic style, written by a poet who has forced himself to forget his culture and to string words and thoughts together in the way a laconic, down-to-earth peasant would do.

and, While the film was being shot and edited, I often found myself pushing the screenplay to one side and opening my copy of the novel again, making a note of several splendid phrases to ‘preserve intact’ and integrate into the soundtrack* of the film.

* I think he refers here to the famous voice-over he used, but I need to rewatch to confirm

[image error]

So, here they are, out of context, but who needs context when these short out-takes can be considered poems in their own right:

They were happy, yes, but happiness didn’t take possession of them and sweep them away. And there they were, face to face, two separate people.

... they were all straws in the blazing fire of their women’s beauty.

They were holding hands; she had taken off her gloves and one of them lay inside out on her lap, looking like a heart with the aorta severed.
‘Look at my heart on your knees,’ said Jim.

But he who has given loving smiles shall be saved by loving smiles. And they had given each other loving smiles in the past and they were doing it still.

Jim had made up his mind to let things take whatever course they would. With his heart and hands he maintained a little kerb, as it were, round Kate, lest she stray by accident; but he wasn’t going to raise it to the height of a wall.

How fine, how beautiful, to have no marriage certificate, no vows, and to rely from day to day on love alone! But if ever the wind of doubt begins to blow, the world becomes a void.

It was as if their physical love were a shattered moon, apparently intact, revolving in its usual orbit round the earth, with its two fragments still adhering together but ready to fly apart at the slightest shock.

>>><<<>>><<<

Henry-Pierre Roche is still today a rather obscure name, more familiar to fans of French nouveau-vague cinema than to the general public. He has written a second semi-autobiographical novel after this one, one that I am only familiar with through the movie adaptation by the same Francois Truffaut: ‘Les deux Anglaises et le continent’, with similar themes about free love and hurt. I am sure he was a person I would have loved to meet and chat with, in an ideal world.

Yes, he was great, with something languorous about him. He didn’t surprise you because he enchanted you. He had a great deal of love for the human race. He thought people were admirable.

[Lulli · Rating 3 out of 5]

« Se si ama qualcuno, lo si ama così com'è. Non si desidera influenzarlo, perché, se ci riuscisse, non sarebbe più lui. Meglio rinunciare all'essere che si ama che cercare di modificarlo, con la pietà o la tirannia ».

(p. 196)

Una triade di personaggi incredibili e certamente controcorrente per i loro tempi, che vanno dagli anni prima della Prima guerra mondiale a quelli durante e dopo, coi quali non sono entrata subito in sintonia ma alla fine ho imparato a comprenderli senza per forza giustificarli. Jules, ebreo razionale e pragmatico dell'impero asburgico e Jim, cattolico francese romantico allampanato sono opposti nel fisico e nel carattere ma si attraggono, forse anche sessualmente, dubbio che aleggia nel lettore lungo tutta la storia, amici inseparabili che condividono tutto insieme, anche e soprattutto le donne, che fanno da tramite al loro amore non fisico. Kathe è una di queste donne, personaggio femminile sicuramente singolare, dal forte carattere volubile, intelligente, indipendente e sensuale, vendicativa e vanitosa ma che guadagna e mantiene l'affetto il rispetto di Jules e Jim, nonostante i suoi capricci, esagerazioni e le azioni irreparabili. Ammetto che l'ho trovata inizialmente insopportabile, crudele, colei che voleva sempre avere il vantaggio relativo sul partner, che sferzava sempre il primo colpo al minimo dubbio di tradimento. Ma anche decisa e decisiva, con un elevato senso di giustizia, una donna che sa ciò che vuole e non si tira indietro, vive la vita pienamente agli estremi dell'esistenza, senza rimpianti né pentimenti né onta. Trasmette una sensazione di libertà e di ribellione cosciente e controllata Kathe, che spiazza i suoi due amanti e amati e anche il lettore. Si tratta sempre di una donna che vive la vita secondo i propri dettami della coscienza e le proprie regole, senza prenderle in prestito dal mondo circostante, in maniera anticonformista. Forse un po' si prova anche invidia nei suoi confronti, di non essere un figura monumentale come lei, di non avere timori nei confronti della vita o del mondo esterno, o quegli scatti di rabbia così potenti e pericolosi, che saranno fatali alla fine per lei e Jim.

La scrittura è asciutta e Roché scrive una sorta di cronaca della vita dei tre inseparabili amici, che contiene ovviamente anche elementi fortemente autobiografici e richiami del suo passato. È tutto essenziale, si descrivono le azioni dei personaggi e solo in rarissime volte si esprimono i loro pensieri, come se si guardasse un film. Alla fine è finito per piacermi.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jules et Jim is one of the most famous celluloid love stories of all time. It is the story of a love triangle between two Germans (Jules and Katie) and a Frenchman (Jim) in early 20th century Europe, it is the story of a threesome who sought to “redefine love” and the heartache which is caused by this plan. It is, however, a little known fact that the story is partially based on actual events and is based in the criminally unknown novel of the same name, by Henri-Pierre Roche. The novel is one of the masterpieces of European fiction-yet it is not, in any way, shape or form, beautifully written, it does not deal with great philosophical or political themes, nor did it revolutionize literature in the way that say, Joyce or Kafka did. As Richard Arnold said of Anna Karenina, “We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art. We are to take it as a piece of life. A piece of life it is!” So too is Jules et Jim a work of life, it recreates the joys and sorrows of not only life, but of love, friendship, parenthood and art.

Jules, shy, sensitive and portly, meets Jim, charming, dashing and bohemian, in the build-up to a ball. They become immediate friends, they translate each other’s works (from French to German and vice versa), buy each cigars, spend long evenings in the cafés of Paris together. Many people silently suspect them of homosexuality, an accusation which both men are either oblivious or indifferent to.

The two eventually begin, in tandem, to pursue the women of Paris. Jules is an idealistic and romantic; an idolater of love, what matters to Jules is not so much the person who he is in love with, but the actual emotion of being in love, women act more of an empty vessel for Jules’s vibrant imagination and rich emotional life. Jules concept of love acts more as a caricature of love, he symbolises the kind of romanticised notion of “great love” represented by shrewish and virginal Victorian lady novelists, for Jules women are a gaping chasm which he can fill with his imagination and ideals, a relationship represents a simulacrum of emotions rather than an actual emotional connection.

Jim, in contrast, is a pragmatist and a bit of a playboy, not in the classical sense; Jim doesn’t go chasing after women, he certainly doesn’t set out to hurt or use women or brag about his conquests . As Jules says, Jim is constantly seeking new experiences, for Jim outside of art and perhaps Jules, women present Jim with his richest and significant experiences, unlike Jules, Jim is able to appreciate women as individuals, for their personal idiosyncrasies, the pleasure of each kiss, the curve of each breast and the feel of each hair. Two two are aware of their contradictory attitude towards women, indeed their differences are perhaps the very thing which brings them closer together.

Jules and Jim gradually begin introducing women to one another, with Jim having the more success. Although Roche often devotes a paragraph to the many women Jules and Jim meet or fall in love with, he is able to demonstrate his skill as a storyteller by making each woman seem like an actual living individual in the space of a few lines. Roche’s gift for psychological description is central to his brilliance as a storyteller, to create with a few words create a realistic, well rounded character is something few people possess and is a testament to Roche’s powers of observation.

Take, for example, the artist Gertrude who dreamed of meeting Napoleon in a lift and bearing his love child, or Odile who decides the go swimming one day and wanders around in a French town in nothing but her swimwear (in what were more conservative times), the astonished townspeople, much to Odile’s consternation decide to have her arrested, though she only sees this as petty jealousy on the part of the town’s female women. She somewhat haphazardly blames Jules and Jim for this and decides to poison their omelette in return.

The most important character amongst the various women Jules and Jim get to know is Lucie. In typical Roche fashion, he able to sum Lucie up in a few lines whilst maintaining her individuality. “She was a long-skulled Gothic beauty; she took her time over everything she did, so that other people found every moment endowed with the same abundant value that she conferred on herself.” Lucie is, in many ways, a kind of female version of Jules, shy, introverted and imaginative, Jules has been in love with her for years, yet she does not return his love, perhaps because of their similarities, so Jules chooses to introduce her to Jim, who is smitten by her patience, her meekness and her forbearance, and perhaps subconsciously, for her resemblance to Jules. Although Lucie begins to return Jim’s feeling her timidity inhibits any relationship between the two, she has a fear of physical love, preferring, like Jules, to contemplate love rather than live it.

Roche never judges his characters, indeed his characters rarely judge each other. They see each person as a unique person and each relationship as a unique experience. Yes there are betrayals, fits of pique and jealousy, feelings are hurt and at times even hatred is aroused, but rather then viewing these as purely negative things, Roche purports that every experience is something we can learn from, that if you never suffer any heartache, jealousy or hatred you are never really alive, and that one cannot ever live without dying a little bit beforehand. Love is a thing to be experience, in all it’s forms, rather than a thing to be contemplated, as Truffaut says “Jules et Jim is a perfect hymn to love, and perhaps life.” For Roche, each person is unique with their own set of idiosyncrasies, traits and insecurities, and should not be judged if they want to follow their own unique path in life, it is, if they try not to hurt other people, a thing to be celebrated. Roche was one of the first people to translate Chekhov into French, and one can see his influence seeping through, if not stylistically, then certainly thematically.

Whilst the two are holidaying in Greece they come across a Greek statue with an ,’archaic smile’: “A toy steamer took them to the island; they hurried to their statue and spent an hour with it. It was beyond even what they hoped. They lingered around the goddess in silence, gazing at her form different angles; her smile was a floating presence, powerful youthful, thirsty for kisses and perhaps for blood.” They promise each other that if they were to ever meet that archaic smile then they would follow it.

Eventually they are introduced to Kate, who had the smile of the statute on the island. Jules chooses to meet her alone over the course of a few weeks before formally introducing her to Jim, tellingly before he does introduce them, he tells Jim that Kate is his, and his alone, and unlike the other girls, not for sharing.



The three eventually forms a close friendship together, one of the most famous scenes in the film is when the two dress Kate as a man and parade him around Paris. In one of the most telling scenes in the book (and film) the three have a race, Kate decides to cheat and starts running whilst Jim is counting down, and ends up winning the race. Jules and Jim end up following in her wake, exhausted yet exulted by Kate’s verve, willing to be carried wherever Kate takes them. Kate doesn’t feel any remorse about cheating; in fact, she views at her right to do as she wishes.

Kate and Jules eventually get engaged, she admits to being won over by his Buddha-esque character, by his lack of egoism and arrogance and his timidity and sensitivity, so unlike other men. Jules, however, proceeds to ignore her during the celebration and decides to talk about literature with Jim instead. Jim is despondent by Jules inability to see the blunders he was now making with Kate, he feels that Jules would not be able to keep a woman as free-spirited as Kate for long. Jim is proved right when Kate suddenly jumps into the Seine on the way back, Jim, however, is enchanted by Kate’s lack of inhibitions, her ability to “do different”.

After Jim fishes Kate out of the Seine, the jump is never mentioned again, Kate is exonerated because she cannot held accountable for her desires-indeed, if she stopped being so wilful then Jules and Jim would no longer be attracted to her.

Just before the two get married, Kate asks Jim to meet her for dinner at 7:00. Jim turns up 4 minutes late, waits until 7:50 and leaves, feeling that Kate was the type of woman who would not tolerate lateness of any kind, Kate herself only turns up at 8, waits 10 minutes and leave. This scene is of central importance to the book because it turns out that Kate wanted to know Jim’s opinion on her marriage to Jules. It turns out that Jim would have told her that Jules’s fantastical nature meant that he was not the right man for Kate, that her wilfulness would eventually break Jules will and that the reality of love would eventually crush Jules’s and whose purely emotional concept of love Kate was unlikely to share. These 10 minutes, it turns out, would shape the rest the trio’s lives as Kate and Jules end up marrying and moving to Germany not long before the First World War breaks out.



Jim visits the couple not longer after the end of the war, unable to contain his excitement at meeting Jules again, he wanders around aimlessly for a few days, before meeting Jules. Superficially the couple seem happy, they live in a somewhat secluded château and have two daughters, however Jim intuits that everything is not as it seems. He soon discovers that his suspicions that Jules was not the kind of man who could keep Kate happy were right. Kate has only recently returned after a trip to a local farm, she has also taken several lovers, some in retribution for either actual or imaginary crimes Jules has committed, Kate still remains a law unto herself, living up to the archaic smile which Jules and Jim glimpsed on the Greek island.



Jules, however, is worried that soon Kate will leave them for good, she is seeing Albert, a friend of Jules, who plans on marrying Kate and adopting her two daughter. Jules remains powerless against the will of Kate, any attempt to stop her would only infuriate her, and cause her to seek revenge, not because she is malicious but because she views life as a kind of game, whereby any advantage another person gains over her, she must win back, at whatever cost. Kate certainly demonstrate certain sociopathic tendencies: her indifference for the feeling of other people, her morbid individuality which makes her shed societal norms, her unwillingness to admit that she is ever at fault for her actions. Jules, however, finally has to discard his naive idea of romantic love when he marries Kate,and it crushes him, making him gradually retreat even further into a Buddha like state of meditation.

Although Jim pities both his friends, he never chooses to judge them or sermonize them. Besides this, Jules wants Jim to win Kate back from Albert, although he can bear her infidelities, he cannot bear her leaving him, and feels Jim is the most suitable suitor for the job. Jim and Kate go for a long walk, they both give their side of the story, they both realise that they have different accounts of their story not because either of them is wrong, but because reality is an entirely subjective experience and perhaps there is no right or wrong, and that each individual experiences reality in their own way. By the end of the walk, much to Jules’s delight, they have become lovers.

Jim then more or less lives with the couple for some months,and their happiness is reborn. Jim and Kate began a tempestuous relationship; Kate cannot dominate Jim like she did Jules, he isn’t anywhere near as submissive, love changes from a kind of game as it was with Jules, to a kind of war, long periods of peace are punctuated by frenzied periods of infighting, whereby each tries (and fails) to gain the upper hand over the other. Each victory is rendered pyrrhic however, by the fact that Jim reciprocates Kate’s demand that every blunder must be accounted for. Jules looks on, content to watch his friends relationship unfold and chooses not to judge; with people as wilful as Jim and Kate, it would be better to let them do as they wished, however much they hurt each other. Jules, Jim and Kate seek to redefine love, as Truffaut states “When I read Jules et Jim, I had the feeling that I had before me an example of something the cinema had never manage to achieve: to show two men who love the same woman, in such a way that the public are unable to make an emotional choice between the characters, because they are made to love all three of them equally….a triangle of pure love.”

Kate and Jim attempt to have a child; their attempts, however, are fruitless, although they are medically able to have children, their passionate relationship is ultimately barren. In seeking to rewrite the concept of love the two are unable to produce anything of subsistence, their selfish, though unique, passion is inimical reproducing life, perhaps in living life to the full they have give up their ability to reproduce it?

This inability to have children eventually takes a toll on their relationship, which descends into a perpetual cycle of happiness, love, passion, obsession, jealousy, betrayal, recrimination and reunion. During one telling passage, Kate cheats on Jim with Harold, an old flame of hers, he hits her in return. Kate is exultant, no man had ever lain hands on her, lord knows she deserves it for all the pain and suffering she caused. Jim however, is despondent how: far will this passion, this passion which has been consuming his soul, slowly crushing him, go on for? Jim and Jules question why they are love with Kate? They decide that it is because Kate is a real woman , with her beauty, her flaws and her inconsistencies, because Kate is unafraid to live and challenge life, come what may, and Jules and Jim had promised to follow that archaic smile on that Greek island, even if it killed them. Kate, in her turn, loves the two because they were able to give Kate what she ultimately desired: their undivided attention.

Just before Jim is about to leave Paris the couple decide to separate, they make love in a passionless, indifferent, almost frigid way. Jim goes back to Paris mentally exhausted, yet he learns from Jules, that Kate is finally pregnant with his child, the result of their night of passionless love making. Kate, however, has a miscarriage, both see this as the nail on the coffin of their passionate but ultimately barren relationship. Kate decides to go back to Jules’s mild and undemanding love, Jim back to an old lover who he had kept in contact with, who also offered him a comfortable if unexceptional relationship.

“Time was flowing, flowing…Happiness isn’t easy to record, then it wars out, and nobody notices…”

The two then split up and get back together intermittently, the fire of their love seems to be on it’s dying embers. One day, as Jim is driving Kate somewhere, she decides to attack him with a walking stick, after she casually mentions Gilberte, the woman who Jim is in a serious relationship with. Kate later threatens to kill Jim after he tells her that he is planning on having a child with Gilberte. Kate gets hold of a revolver, but Jim is able to knock her out before she can shoot. The tangled web of their relationship is beginning to unravel as Kate is slowly losing her sanity, due to her jealousy over Gilberte. Jim equates Jules with Gilberte; Kate myopically refuses to see it this way, thinking that one rules exists for her and one for everybody else. “Jim wanted to die of his love for Kate. To survive was an offence. Male spiders know it-and so do their females.”

Kate invites Jules and Jim for a day out, and as she is dropping Jules off at the train station, she asks Jules to watch them drive off. As she is driving off, she takes an unusual detour, Jim asks her where she is driving them to, eventually realising that she is driving them into the Seine for a second leap, this one of death, just as her first leap had kindled Jim’s love for her, her second would put an end to it, and fulfil their desire to die for love of one another-in his final moments Jim realises that this suicide plunge was Kate’s way of proving her love for him, her archaic smile comes back, the very archaic smile that Jim promised to pursue in order to live: even if it killed him. The car careers into the Seine and sinks, when their bodies are found they have come apart-which is part of the reason that they died, despite the fact that Kate drove the car into the Seine to bring them closer together, their bodies seperate, killing them both.

Jules takes charges of their two daughters; along with a sense of sadness at losing the two people he loved most in the world, a sense of relief comes flooding into him as he realises he will never have to put up with their antics again, never have the fear that Kate will leave him for another man.

Jules et Jim is a powerful and beautiful love story because it discards the facile and rudimentary emotions associated with love by mainstream cinema and romantic literature; it captures the essence of love via various well rounded and interesting characters without judging their actions and teaches us to accept people as they are ; as Jules states “If you love somebody you love him as he is. You don’t want to influence him, because then he wouldn’t be the same person any more. It is better to give up the person you love than try to change him, whether by kindness or domination.” Yes the characters are flawed, selfish and sometimes irrational: but who isn’t? Love is an emotion based on an individual connection between two people and cannot be reduced to the clichés of mainstream cinema or television.

Jim and Kate are, in many ways, self-absorbed, whether it be with themselves or one another. This is best represented by the fact that they are unable to have a child together. For all of the passion of their romance, their love is essentially barren because they fail to take into account other people, whether it be Jules or Kate’s children. On the other hand Jules, who willingly gives up Kate for Jim to keep them happy, is able to produce life and have children with her. The two eventually die as they loved: together and selfishly and yet ultimately still apart, discarding Jules and Kate’s daughter’s, to fulfil their ultimate desire: to die in each other’s arms, only to, somewhat ironically, come apart as they are drowning.

[Elisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nonostante il libro e i capitoli siano molto brevi e lo stile semplice, ho fatto molto fatica a concludere la lettura di questo libro.
Riconosco la novità del tema e dello stile, ma proprio per le caratteristiche di quest'ultimo, scarno e documentaristico, esso sarebbe dovuto essere supportato, a mio parere, da una trama più coinvolgente e più ricca di fatti, mentre la prima parte si limita ad essere una scarna elencazione delle donne che Jules e Jim condividono. La seconda metà diventa più interessante, in quanto approfondisce maggiormente i rapporti e il triangolo tra i tre protagonisti. Ma, bisogna dire che, se questo è un romanzo sull'amicizia, questo tema viene completamente perso di vista a partire dalla comparsa del personaggio di Kathe. Da quel momento Jules e Jim diventano due marionette tra le sue mani, Jules scompare quasi completamente e Jim si cura ben poco di lui. E se invece il libro doveva essere un inno all'amore libero o comunque a una nuova concezione dell'amore, innovativa, non ha comunque raggiunto il suo scopo, perché la relazione tra Jim e Kathe viene rovinata dalle loro gelosie e dalle ripicche infantili che si fanno a vicenda, non tenendo conto dell'altro. L'amore che vediamo tratteggiato da Roché è puramente egoistico. Oltretutto, proprio per questo motivo, non sono riuscita a provare empatia per nessuno dei personaggi, le cui azioni sono dettate semplicemente da un desiderio momentaneo; sembrano non riflettere su nulla, perdendosi in sofismi e sottigliezze espresse in forme eleganti che si rivelano essere solo aria fritta.
Lo stile, molto particolare, a me non è dispiaciuto, ma i felici momenti di lirismo che lo valorizzano, con frasi brevi e poetiche, che sintetizzano un concetto più ampio, quasi in forma di aforisma, sono molto pochi.

[Mariannemme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ci ho pensato, e alla fine il responso è stato quattro stelle e per un unico motivo, aver già visto il capolavoro di Truffaut. Cosa dire di questo romanzo splendido se non che assomiglia ad un fiume, alla Senna? Imperdibile.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

My interest to read "Jules et Jim" was peaked after seeing Truffaut's film adaptation of the novel, a cult-classic made up of memorable moments unravelling at an awkward pace. Not quite sure of what to make of the film, my only thought about the work (the core of the work -- the novel that inspired it) was that it must have more to it than what meets the eye.

The book lived up to this expectation. The awkward pace is all there; a series of simple, precise sentences that present themselves between the deeply poetic and the incredibly trivial, and tend to stay at one of these extremes, as they move forward at an unusually fast rate. Such is the character of the story: passionate, effervescent.

In my opinion, this book will not be to everyone's taste, literary or emotional. In a way, it is to be read less like a novel, and more like a fictionalised essay; though semi-biographical, it seems to aim at putting a message across rather than weaving together a reflective plot. In the end, there is only so much to be said of the spontaneous outbursts of three friends who travel, love and live; and the book is captivating in another way, for its honesty. For its unpretentious take on what Life is and what Life could be, on the boundaries of love and friendship and on the ultimate tragedy of it all, and on the way it so casually describes emotional revolution.

Certainly different and far from technical perfection, "Jules et Jim" is a passionate, emotional read that both surprised and captivated me, and that I am sure I will read again two, or five, or ten years from now, and take another meaning from -- one less surprising, but surely no less powerful.

[Giorgia Imbriani · Rating 1 out of 5]

Arrivata a metà l’ho dovuto fisicamente lanciare contro il muro, esasperata. Ora aspetto che qualcuno mi spieghi il senso di tutte quelle pagine sprecate a mettere in fila brevi frasi sul noioso trascorrere quotidiano di questi due.

[ali ☆ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“L’amore, l’indifferenza si alternavano in loro. Era quest’ultima a guadagnare terreno, ma l’amore, quando c’era, travolgeva ancora tutto,
Kathe aveva detto: «Si ama pienamente per un attimo solo.» Quell’attimo ritornava sempre.”


Personalmente ho preferito il film di Truffaut, anche se ho apprezzato molto anche il romanzo di Roché. Lo stile di scrittura, secco, frammentato, quasi telegrafico, contribuisce a creare un senso di distacco con il lettore. Nonostante ciò, penso che le frasi siano state costruite meravigliosamente da Roché che, dicendo poco, ha fatto capire tutto.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A different kind of love story.

[El · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jules and Jim become friends in Paris and share much of their life together - particularly their women. It's a story of Bohemian Paris in the early part of the 20th-century, plenty of love (er, lust) and cigarettes and alcohol and free will.

Kate, a German woman, enters the picture, especially striking Jules' fancy. He initially asks Jim not to make any advances towards her, but ultimately Kate turns to Jim for the desire she is lacking with Jules. There is very little conflict surrounding this as Jules facilitates the relationship. Both men watch as Kate runs back and forth between them, and also to past lovers as well.

I have a completely lackluster response to the book as it was written in a completely lackluster way. Supposedly autobiographical I wound up feeling sorry for all of the characters because of their weakness. There's an easy confusion between "weakness" and "free will" and the three central characters were clearly baffled by this. In their searches to be happy they spent a lot of time making sure every one else was happy, all in turn causing a lot of unhappiness all around.

The Truffaut film was at least cinematically interesting, though even by the end of the movie I was hating on most of the characters. I can not, for the life of me, figure out what was so damn appealing about Kate that everyone allowed her to treat them the way she did. It's a classic love story of looking for love in all the wrong places.

[Aida · Rating 5 out of 5]

Make yourself a gift and read this gem of a book.

[新新 Xin-Xin · Rating 4 out of 5]

總覺得居樂與雋比夏日之戀更貼近整個故事的氣氛，好想在暑假的時候讀他們（雖然我已沒有暑假）

我是好奇夏宇作為譯者才借，夏宇和楚浮描述自己怎麼被這本小說深深吸引真的好好看，而且一讀之後覺得真的是整個下午可以沈浸其中的文字，句子不長篇幅也不長，但會有種捨不得看太快的感覺。

看到書友說這部電影比小說好，兩個女孩在歐陸則是小說比電影好。

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't seen the famous film of this novel, but I know people that I have, and they have all sung its praises. When I saw this book in the library (I wasn't even aware the film was based on a novel before!), I couldn't resist snapping it up. It was an easy read, but the subject matter wasn't as lighthearted as I'd assumed from reading the blurb on the back.

Anything to do with bohemianism, Paris, café culture and free spirits tends to lure me in where books are concerned, but I was surprised to find that this was not the crux of the story in Jules et Jim. Roché's novel is somewhat autobiographical which is very interesting, more so because it was his debut novel and was written in his seventies. He based the character Jim on himself, and Jules on a friend in his life, and what characters they both were! All the women in their lives they shared equally, and without hatred and distrust, which is a concept I can't even begin to understand. I think I was more surprised at this attitude to life and love because of the time period it was set in, around 1907 and onwards. There was me thinking that back in the early twentieth century people were very uptight when it came to love, sex, and everything in between!

Kate is the character that truly tests Jules and Jim. She is a firecracker, a woman akin to the two men in terms of her view and approach to life. However, I found her a very difficult character to warm to. Although not without her charms, Kate was in short an extremely selfish woman, brash and quick to act whilst not always making the right decisions. She was easily angered throughout, even when as a reader I felt she shouldn't have been, and she was not shy of hurting people to get her own back on them, particularly Jules and later Jim.

What saddened me a little with this novel, and hence the slightly lower rating, was that although the title is Jules et Jim, Jules wasn't in very much of the book at all! It should have been Jules, Jim, et Kate, or even Jim et Kate, although I suppose without the complete alliteration it doesn't have quite the same ring to it. I found myself missing Jules as a character (although he seemed a bit silly at the start), and longing to be rid of Jim and his ridiculous feelings for Kate for just a few chapters!

I fully intend on watching the film, as I'd love to see how this simple story was transferred to the screen. The writing in the novel is so simple and direct, that it's almost like just reading an everyday diary (although there are moments of literary beauty), and I imagine that it would lend itself quite well to a film, whilst allowing room for development in certain areas. For those who have seen the film and enjoyed it, I'd suggest giving the book a go - maybe you'll get something extra from it, who knows.

[Arianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jules e Jim è la storia di un’amicizia, la stessa che porta i loro nomi: Jules e Jim. Il titolo infatti sembra proprio alludere a quell’unione assoluta, pura e genuina che si instaura tra i due giovani e che fin da subito il lettore comprende esser destinata a durare nel tempo e nello spazio. Il romanzo è costruito intorno al motivo centrale del triangolo, metafora delle relazioni passionali fra Jules, Jim e la donna amata. L’originalità di questo romanzo è che ogni qual volta si presenta l’occasione di un triangolo amoroso, Jules e Jim tengono il loro affetto e rispetto per l’altro al riparo da ogni tipo di odio o scontro competitivo. Anzi, cedere le donne amate a Jim è per Jules un atto di affetto, un regalo nei confronti del suo grande amico. L’amore e i sentimenti di Jules e Jim nei confronti delle donne amate sono indubbiamente sinceri. Ciò che appare meno evidente è che inconsapevolmente i due giovani amici ripongono tanto amore e sentimento in quella determinata donna proprio perché per loro rappresenta il collante che li terrà per sempre uniti l’uno all’altro. La donna è quindi ipostasi del loro rapporto, è amicizia che si fa corpo tramite il quale Jim può amare Jules e Jules può amare Jim. E se per tutto il romanzo Jules e Jim sembrano apparentemente allontanarsi a causa proprio delle donne amate, come due grandi calamite dai poli opposti, inevitabilmente finiscono sempre per attrarsi e ritrovarsi insieme per l’ennesima volta. Nel suo romanzo Roché fa riferimento a un disegno di Willette in cui un ubriaco picchia con una bottiglia vuota la giovane e bella moglie e si legge: “E’ duro da uccidere, un amore”. “Ah sì,” sospirò Jim “quanto è duro!… E se non fosse possibile affatto?”. L’amicizia tra Jules e Jim è proprio questo, è un amore a cui non si può porre fine neanche uccidendo i loro corpi. Scegliendo di frapporre nel titolo la congiunzione coordinativa fra i due protagonisti del romanzo, Roché sembra aver strizzato l’occhio al suo lettore come a voler dire che quella congiunzione salda tiene insieme, ma allo stesso tempo funge da specchio che si frappone fra i due: così simili, come l’iniziale che condividono e così diversi come il resto del loro nome. Jules e Jim, Jim e Jules.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm rating this on memory. Read it years ago because I loved Truffaut's film. I enjoyed the book a lot then, but I should give it another reading.

[Sonia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chiedo perdono al mondo per la mia ignoranza. Chiedo perdono a Truffaut e Roche. Chiedo perdono perchè non conoscendo nulla della trama, ho sempre creduto che jules e jim fossero una lei e un lui....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa scusassero tutti!!!! mi sono vergognata emortificata alla lettura delle prime righe...
Non so che dire del libro, forse avrei preferito di gran lunga il film, che ovviamente mi ripropongo di vedere, ma i personaggi... sono così lontani dal mio modo di vedere la vita che se il romanzo fosse ambientato su di un pianeta assurdo non mi sembrerebbe irreale.
Come si fa ad amare così? come si fa a permettere certi atteggiamenti? o si è di vedute infinatamente larghe o non si è per niente innamorati.Per me è inaccettabile una situazione, tutte le situazioni che vivono i protagonisti.
E kathe è di un capriccioso e di un viziato e di un folle che non si sopporta proprio. Forse solo Jules si salva, però alla fine anche lui... dai ma ti fai prendere per culo da tutt?? bah, chi lo capisce sto scrittore che pare essesi ispirato alla sua vita. poveretto.i

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it. The language was simple, short and to the point..apparently it's actually a 'social revolution' masquarading under pages full of lust.
The word 'love' is thrown around quite a lot. In my eyes, Jules starts out as a pompous idiot but then matures into a man while the other two (Kate & Jim) remain blissfully ignorant children, completely prey to their wills and wants.

Unlike a lot of books that I read, this one was easy for me to rate, I liked this book. I didn't think it was amazing at all, and I don't understand how someone could, but I suppose we all have our own interpretations.
It's worth pointing out that in Britain Henri-Pierre Roché is pretty unknown..I see a few Italian reviews here though, maybe it's studied in their schools.

(this, like many other books I'll be reading in the coming weeks is part of my 'EuroFiction' module)

Good, quick read.
Why not give a chance, see what you think.

[ilaria ౨ৎ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Non so, sinceramente, come si possa amare così una donna - e anche un amico. Un’intensità che rasenta il ridicolo e il grottesco e una devozione fragile come la cartapesta. Nonostante i capitoli brevi e lo stile semplice ho fatto davvero fatica a completarlo. Guarderò il film, sperando di cambiare idea anche solo in parte.

[Susu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wenn man den Film mag, dann sollte man das Buch unbedingt lesen.
Ohne den Film - könnte das Buch über eine Dreiecks-Beziehung spröde wirken.

[Laurent Balt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un livre qui porte sur l'amour, oui, mais surtout sur l'amitié de Jules et Jim. Le style de Roché est singulier et beau.

[Riccardo Mazzocchio · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Dati quattro esseri legati in modi diversi dall'amore, perchè doveva nascere la discordia? Perchè ognuno ha il suo irriducibile punto di vista e giudica gli altri secondo se stesso!" Un intreccio complicato e inverosimile in cui non c'è spazio per la quotidianità: la vita è una vacanza. Una comunione di corpi dove la vera fedeltà rimane quella tra le menti. Ho visto anche il film in bianco e nero di Truffaut tratto dal libro. Una storia non facile da mettere in scena per il ritmo incalzante e frammentato, come certi quadri di certi impressionisti. Se la cava benissimo, a mio avviso.

[Kia]

My copy includes an afterword by François Truffaut, who deigns to only include a throwaway sentence about Franz Hessl as Jules. Bummer! Roché depicts him so fondly, after reading walking in Berlin I almost feel like Hessl is a personal friend of mine as well

[Tanya Mazneva · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kate, when I catch you, Kate 😡😡

[Marinus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schnell, unterhaltsam, schön.

Mischung aus reality TV Liebesdrama und -Chaos gemischt mit einem Setting der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts in Europa und einem schnellen, gehaltvollen Schreibstil.

[_nuovocapitolo_ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quel romanzo, qualche tempo dopo, fece innamorare perdutamente il regista francese François Truffaut, che ne trasse un film meraviglioso, dal titolo omonimo, diventato, nel tempo, un vero e proprio cult. Truffaut chiese allo stesso Roché, che accettò con entusiasmo, di scrivere i dialoghi per la sceneggiatura, solo che non riuscì a farlo, perché morì poco dopo, a un passo dagli ottant’anni.

C’è da dire che il grande successo e la popolarità del film, pian piano, hanno quasi completamente eclissato quella del romanzo, di cui, ancora oggi, in molti, ignorano l’esistenza.

Roché viene descritto, da chi lo ha conosciuto, come un uomo molto affascinante, dotato di una personalità carismatica ed eclettica, per certi versi geniale. È stato un gran viaggiatore, amante delle belle donne, amico intimo di personaggi famosi e influenti, critico letterario, traduttore, boxeur, esperto e appassionato d’arte, tant’è che si è occupato personalmente dell’acquisto di alcune opere per conto del grande collezionista e mecenate John Quinn.

Aveva poco più di vent’anni quando, insieme al suo migliore amico, lo scrittore Franz Hessel, prima dello scoppio del Conflitto Mondiale, frequentava assiduamente i caffè di Parigi in cui si poteva respirare a pieni polmoni quello che era il fermento culturale e politico dell’epoca.

L’amicizia fraterna che lo legava a Hessel è durata per tutta la vita. Un’amicizia speciale e fuori dagli schemi che meritava di essere raccontata anche - e soprattutto - per il Ménage à trois che lo legò indissolubilmente a Hessel e sua moglie.

L’amicizia tra i due uomini, infatti, non venne mai scalfita, nemmeno quando Pierre Roché e Helen Grund, travolti dalla passione, diventarono amanti, e non fu nulla di passeggero, tra l’altro, perché il loro rapporto, consumato alla luce del sole, durò per ben 13 anni.

Così, ecco che Jules e Jim sono gli alter ego di Hessel e Roché, mentre Kathe, la protagonista femminile, è la trasposizione letteraria di Helen Grund (giornalista e pittrice di nazionalità tedesca).

In questo meraviglioso romanzo, che ha l’andamento di un diario, il racconto della vita dei protagonisti è suddiviso in tanti piccoli capitoli, in cui, a fare da spartiacque temporale, troviamo il primo conflitto mondiale e naturalmente Kathe. Perché è proprio l’incontro con questa donna “biondissima, con la pelle abbronzata dal sole”, che aveva un “sorriso arcaico” identico a quello della statua greca che aveva tanto affascinato Jules e Jim durante uno dei loro viaggi, a ridisegnare il corso della vita dei due amici.

Ciò che traspare fin dalla lettura delle prime pagine, è la grandissima sintonia tra i due protagonisti. Due personalità molto differenti, ma proprio per questo, complementari. Due “anime gemelle”, legate in modo profondo e indissolubile da un grandissimo affetto e rispetto; un rapporto pregno di cure e attenzioni reciproche. Nessuna gelosia, nessuno screzio, nessun risentimento.

“Constatavano le loro divergenze con tenerezza… Accade, questo, in amore? Jules si chiese se esisteva una coppia che si accettasse come lui e Jim.”

Condividevano tutto Jules e Jim, non solo viaggi ed esperienze di ogni tipo, ma anche le donne, e non mi riferisco solo a Kathe, ma anche agli amori giovanili. Sembrerà strano, ma i due amici si innamoravano quasi sempre delle stesse donne e Jules si ritrovava ad accettare di buongrado il fatto che quasi tutte finissero per preferirgli il suo amico del cuore: “Certi direbbero che Jim è un seduttore. Io dico che è un sedotto.”

Jules e Jim conoscono Kathe a Parigi e ne rimangono entrambi folgorati. Jules sposa Kathe subito dopo averla conosciuta e per la prima volta, quasi pregandolo, chiede a Jim, che già la ama un po’, di farsi da parte: “… questa no… vero, Jim?”.

La figura di Kathe emerge pian piano, ed è tratteggiata alla perfezione. Bellissima, un po’ donna e un po’ bambina, elegante, raffinata, capricciosa, vendicativa, passionale e appassionata; innocente e crudele allo stesso tempo, refrattaria a ogni forma di convenzione, sempre sopra le righe e soprattutto imprevedibile in ogni sua azione e reazione; perennemente insoddisfatta e in cerca di conferme che potessero riempire quelle nicchie di insicurezza che le abitavano dentro.

Kathe catalizzava su sé stessa l’attenzione di tutti e per gli uomini era quasi impossibile resisterle. In verità, anche lei faceva fatica a resistere agli uomini. Davanti al fascino e all’intelligenza, infatti, cedeva sempre, e non ne faceva mistero. Viveva le sue relazioni extraconiugali in modo libero, quasi come fosse, allo stesso tempo, un suo diritto e un suo bisogno.

Attraverso il tradimento, usando il sesso come mezzo, puniva chi amava. Era consapevole di ferire, ma non le importava, anzi, l’idea di far male, le faceva provare un piacere quasi sadico. Kathe era decisamente narcisista e quello era il suo modo per rimettere tutto in ordine e “pareggiare i conti”, con cosa e con chi, non risulta chiaro, però. Forse con sé stessa, con le sue insicurezze e le sue paure. Kathe pretendeva dai suoi uomini fedeltà e dedizione assoluta, pur non concedendole in cambio e Jules lo aveva capito bene: “La tua massima è questa: in una coppia, bisogna che almeno uno dei due sia fedele, l’altro”.

Quando Jim, finita la guerra, dopo cinque lunghi anni di separazione, raggiunge finalmente Jules nel sud della Germania, dove si era stabilito da un po’ di tempo con Kathe e i loro due figli, riceve le confidenze dell’amico, che non può fare a meno di raccontargli che il suo matrimonio è in crisi, che sua moglie lo tradisce abitualmente e che teme l’ennesimo abbandono da parte sua. “Jules si era abituato all’idea che lei gli fosse infedele, ma non ancora a quella che lo lasciasse”.

Anche Kathe si confida con Jim e gli dice di essere tornata a casa da soli tre mesi e che Jules, come marito, per lei, non esiste più.

Si abbandonano l’uno all’altra, diventano amanti, ma non si nascondono. Vivono il loro rapporto allo scoperto, come fosse la cosa più normale del mondo. Jules lo sa, i loro figli anche, e ne è quasi sollevato, perché sente che questo è l’unico modo per non perdere Kathe. “Donarla” a Jim e saperla comunque vicina, era meno gravoso che immaginarla chissà dove, con un altro. Anche Jim, d'altronde, era consapevole del fatto che farla sua, l’avrebbe resa “per sempre” anche di Jules.

Sta proprio in questo “rinunciare” alla donna della sua vita per “cederla” al suo migliore amico a definire l’immensità dell’amore di Jules, non solo per Kathe, ma anche per Jim. È consapevole di non essere capace di liberarsi di lei, non vuole farlo e in un certo senso, ne è ossessionato. Quell’ossessione, a qualcuno, potrebbe sembrare un amore masochista e malato e probabilmente lo è, ma poco importa, perché ognuno di noi, in fondo, non fa altro che vivere l’amore per come può e per come è capace di farlo. D’altro canto, al mondo, non esiste sentimento più irrazionale dell’amore.

Kathe resterà “per sempre” anche di Jules? E soprattutto, Jim basterà a Kathe? Le risposte dovrete trovarle da soli, immergendovi nella lettura di questo romanzo che racconta con grande delicatezza e sincera genuinità la storia di un triangolo amoroso, certo, ma anche e soprattutto la storia di tre vite, e quella di una grandissima amicizia. Un’amicizia pura e vera come poche, quella di “Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza”, era così che li soprannominavano. Un amore tenero, disarmante e sconfinato, davanti al quale non si può evitare di ritrovarsi a mettere in discussione l’ipocrisia di certe convenzioni morali e sociali nel rispetto delle quali, un po’ per apparenza e un po’ per convinzione, conduciamo - o fingiamo di condurre - le nostre esistenze.

“Kathe aveva detto: si ama pienamente per un attimo solo”.