Description

‘A triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece’ New Statesman

‘So shrewd, so ruthless, glittering and clever… every page he wrote was a delight’ Fay Weldon

In this novel of desire and perdition, a bored and precocious adolescent pursues the wife of a soldier fighting in the First World War. At first attracted to Marthe out of sheer aimlessness, he finds himself falling in love. Consumed by sensual pleasure and power games, the pair do nothing to disguise their affair – until the consequences of their heedlessness begin to unfold.

This shockingly sexy novel rocketed its teenage author into overnight fame in the 1920s – and was all the more scandalous for being based on his life.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Christopher Moncrieff.

Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923) entered Parisian literary society with a bang when The Devil in the Flesh was published. Only eighteen at the time, he became the star of an unprecedented publicity campaign and earned copious praise and censure for his precocious talent and scandalous behaviour – the more so as the novel was based on his own wartime affair with a soldier’s wife. A protege and perhaps lover of Jean Cocteau, he fraternized with artists, dancers and aristocrats, drank heavily, and generally ran riot, before settling down for a brief period, during which he wrote one more novel, Count d’Orgel, also published by Pushkin Press. Shortly after the manuscript was completed, he contracted typhoid fever and died within a few weeks, aged only twenty. He is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Christopher Moncrieff is a poet, linguist and literary translator from French, German and Romanian. As well as a writing career he has served in the military and produced son et lumiere spectacles. He is descended from the poet Robert Burns.