Besson’s prose is exquisite at conveying the emotions that accompany human desires, longings, fears and failings.

It is also the story of 16 yr old Vincent’s coming of age and loss of innocence under the most devastating of circumstances. Like Michael Cunningham’s homage to Virginia Woolf in The Hours and Jean Rhys’s to Charlotte Bronte in The Wide Sargasso Sea, Philippe Besson’s extravagantly praised first novel pays tribute to Marcel Proust. It is the summer of 1916 and, with German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. I realize that Besson's newest novel, Lie With Me, is getting all the press at the moment (partly due to Andre Aciman's correct praise, and Molly Ringwald's translation). But it didn’t feel like it while reading and Vincent’s extraordinariness is enhanced by another man who fell for him – a young soldier, Arthur, obsessed with death and traumatized by war from which he escaped only for a few days or hours, into Vincent’s arms.The room is filled with our silence, filled with the sounds of bodies brushing against each other, with the sighs of mingled mouths. In 2001 the French edition of the novel won the Prix Emmanuel-Roblès and the first winner of Prix premier Roman de Culture et bibliothèques pour tous de la Sarthe. And then the pestilential stench reaches us from the field strewn with corpses, the stink of a slaughterhouse mingled with gunpowder.

I don't regret the fact that I strolled into the library looking for some piece of modern French literature (which is why I grabbed a book from the PQ shelves), since I was able to pick up this one.I do not know, I cannot know, if all men are that same, but I have an inkling of the universal softness of the male sex. I feel I can put myself in their situation or have indeed experienced something similar in my own lifetime so that I can empathise. Because until now, that's the vibe I have been getting whenever I pick up a piece of LGBT literature. The second part is written in the epistolary format, since both Arthur and Marcel leave Vincent in Paris.

Frustré par ce dénouement qui, pour moi, n'ajoute rien à la tristesse ressentie par les événements de la deuxième partie du livre, mais qui plutôt retire de la crédibilité à cette histoire pourtant si plausible et émouvante. The object is not the end, it is the means through which one connects to the intrinsic beauty of life, where all dimensions and boundaries disappear.This book follows a moderately similar format in that it is told in two parts but this time along a liner timeline rather than in two different time periods. You find that you could send whole fragments of text to relevant people in your life because those fragments tell them precisely the things that you dare not tell them or wish to tell them. The first part focuses on the main character's burgeoning relationships, one physical and intensely passionate, the other intellectual. I felt that this use of the second-person narrative actually made the reader (me) more involved, because the prose felt like Vincent was writing or telling the story to me, and I would fill in the role of Arthur or Marcel, depending on the chapter. Occasionally, you pick up a book not quite knowing why you chose to read it in the first place, but then gradually, page by page, you start to realize that almost every chapter tells you a little about yourself, about your life.