Belle du Seigneur: A Novel

Set largely in the elegant city of Geneva in the mid-1930s, Belle du Seigneur is a terrifying and seductive novel, comic in form and deadly serious in its deflation of the common pieties. Adrian Deume is an aspirant ‘B’ in the sprawling bureaucracy of the League of Nations, and also the head of the ghastly Deume clan, portrayed in a brilliantly sustained commentary on middle-class manners. Then there is a generous helping of the ‘Valiant’, a squabbling quintet who stand, in comic invention, somewhere between Baron Munchhausen and the Marx Brothers. These distinct worlds have a common centre: Solal, Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations. A Mediterranean Jew blessed with great gifts and cursed by crippling idealism, he sees all too clearly that international understanding is eternally undermined by personal and national interests. But it is his affair with Ariane Deume that finally precipitates his fall. He rejects the world and attempts to achieve through love the Absolute which he craves. But it is the eternal contradiction that perfection, once achieved, cannot endure, and Cohen leads him to his fate with a unique brand of teasing, clear-eyed pessimism.