Les gens de la nuit

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“Les Gens de la nuit is not an autobiographical novel. However, how could I not recognize this nocturnal existence as my own, these walks around Paris, these cafés, bars, restaurants, clubs and dives where, due to some subtle and tacit agreement, we would meet each other from time to time without having planned a rendezvous? If the framework of this novel belongs to me, then all that adorns it belongs to the Paris-by-night of the fifties, in the aftermath of the war when, after suffered deprivation for so long, we became extravagant to the point of throwing other people’s things out the window.

The Paris of these mad years has more or less disappeared. (…) Les Gens de la nuit is therefore already an evocation of the past. Certain details situate the story in the era that it belongs to: the time of gramophones and records, of “Indochinese” seminarians, convertible cars and a passion for whisky. One would forgive me for railing against Vodka. I was never a connoisseur. I was sectarian and make amends for this not-wholly-essential point (…) I’ll let the reader smile at the rather unflattering portrait I paint of an academic. He will see here that, in my youth, I was never set on the idea of putting on a bicorn hat, wearing a sword and presenting myself as a soldier of the Republican guard. It happened. Mea Culpa. Life plays these games with you.”

Extract from author’s preface

Born in Paris, Michel Déon (1919-2016) lived in Ireland after having spent a long time in Greece. Winner of the Prix Interaillié in 1970 for Les Poneys sauvages (of which a revised version was published in 2010) and the Le Grand Prix de l’Académie Française in 1973 for Un taxi mauve, he has written over forty books – novels, stories, and memories – published for the most part at Gallimard and La Table Ronde.

"Swinging between jazz and ideological disappointments, violence and fellowship, flighty love and search of salvation, Les Gens de la nuit expresses the pain of living and extolls the living despite everithing.”  Blog De nécessité vertu

"A graceful style which allows the author to elucidate the human feelings with an unalterable elegance.”  Le Figaro littéraire