The Death of a Nobody

Jules Romains

Jan 1914 · B.W. Huebach

About this ebook

The subject of this modern classic is not a man. "It is an event," says Jules Romains, who is considered "the French Dos Passos." The event starts with the death of Jacques Godard, a man of no importance. It unfolds through his brief survival in the minds of others - the porter of his tenement in Paris, his fellow lodgers, a few acquaintances, his old father, who comes up from the country for the funeral, a young stranger who feels that the dead pass into "a great soul that cannot die." The event expresses Romains's belief in "collective beings," the famous theory of "Unanimism." In dramatizing his theory, Romains developed an advanced motion-picture technique when films were in their infancy, a technique of group portraits and sudden shifts from scene to scene that keeps this work far ahead of conventional novels. Here, Romains explores the ideas and the devices used in his twenty-seven-volume masterpiece, Men of Good Will, which André Maurois calls "the boldest attempt to describe completely his own time that any French novelist has made since Balzac."

Ratings and reviews

This is an extraordinary book--barely known, except to lovers of French literature.Romains, too, is largely forgotten--a pity. To me, the novel portrays the inevitable fate of Everyman, and Everywoman, with a simplicity,a tenderness, and a veracity in its quiet, dignified tone which is extraordinary.Perhaps the subject is too frightening--more reason to read this marvelous forgotten work, in terms of gaining comfort about the course of all our lives-RNA