Silvestre, Silve, Robida, Vincent, Berger, Bachelin, Galzy, Chadourne, Veraldi

I read a long series of novels that made next to no impression on me: Charles Silvestre's Prodige du coeur; Claude Silve's Benediction; Michel Robida's Le temps de la longue patience; Raymonde Vincent's Campagne; and Yves Berger's Le Sud. Le serviteur, by Henri Bachelin, is the memoir of a father by his son. Les Allonges by Jeanne Galzy is a novel about rehabilitation patients in 1920s France. It doesn't have the impact of Roman du malade, but it is luminous, and it's not nearly as philosophical as the Magic Mountain. Marc Chadourne's Cecile de la Folie is the story of a man's obsession with a woman. He wants to possess her, psychically as well as physically, and never does, and it was in reading this novel that I realized that men do not require perfection of women. This novel, written in the 20s, talks about how the object of obsession misapplies her face powder, for example, and this matters not a whit to the obsessed. Finally, there is Gabriel Veraldi's Machine Humaine, a novel which astonished me with its modernity, despite its dating from the 1950s.