‘Embryonic’: lost novel by French film-maker Éric Rohmer is republished

In the dog days of the second world war, 24-year-old Maurice Schérer wrote a tale of young lovers in prewar small-town France. He described lazy August swims in the Marne River east of Paris. He wrote about age-gap affairs and semi-incestuous flirtations.

Schérer gallantly used a nom de plume, Gilbert Cordier, to shield his Catholic family from scandal, but he needn’t have bothered as his concerns were unfounded. The finished novel, Élisabeth, barely made a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Undeterred, Scherer adopted a second pseudonym – Éric Rohmer – and decided to try his luck as a film-maker instead.

Now – eight decades on from its first publication, 16 years on from its author’s death – Élisabeth belatedly returns from the cold. Republished in an English-language translation by Aaron Kerner, Rohmer’s book has been greeted with glowing reviews, hailed as a lost modernist classic and a crucial origin story for the award-winning director of Claire’s Knee, The Green Ray and My Night at Maud’s. The fact that it’s by Rohmer?

That’s the icing on the cake. It takes on all the themes that will become more developed, complex and impactful in his films.” Rohmer was working as a freelance journalist in Nazi-occupied Paris when he wrote Élisabeth, which follows a loose-knit group of dreamers in the pregnant summer of 1939. Stung by the book’s failure, he moved on to film criticism and finally to directing, becoming an older member of a generation of French New Wave film-makers that included Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

Plot elements that feel formulaic in Élisabeth are more honest and lively in his films. Two people who are dying to sleep with each other but don’t. That’s probably why I project myself on to every character in every Rohmer film.

I think, ‘Oh my God, I could be this man or this woman. That’s what I’d do or say in that situation.’” The critic Adrian Martin, an expert on New Wave cinema, says that Rohmer’s use of improvisation helped give his films a sense of freshness and freedom. He didn’t like to do multiple takes.