Overall, very good book and I hope more of this author’s work is translated into English in the future. This friendship and mentorship helps him grow more confident in his love for the soldier until news breaks about the true connections between these Parisian gay men.

For Vincent, the sixteen-year-old son of a prestigious family, the tranquillity of the city sits at odds with the salons and soirees he attends.Yes, I was able to predict it, but only at the last minute, when I realized that all the math added up. Vincent meets Marcel in a salon, while he meets Arthur in their estate, since Arthur has a week of leave from the army, and his mother is the governess for Vincent's family. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Vincent reveals more and more to Marcel about Arthur, as he also reveals to Arthur how Marcel has offered advice. One summer, while Paris is empty of men, who have all gone off to war, Vincent happens to meet and strike up a friendship with a renowned author, Marcel.

But Arthur is the lower class fatherless/illegitimate son of Blanche, who is just a house-servant for Vincent's family. I know that this is pleasure, that there is no guilt, no sense of wrong-doing, not in this moment in which we offer ourselves. This is because the chapters that were about Vincent and Marcel were alternating with the chapters about Vincent and Arthur. The French edition of Lie With Me sold over 120,000 copies, was a number one bestseller, and won the prestigious Maison de la Presse prize.Idealmente, a realidade seria mesmo assim, mas não me parece, portanto, exige-me uma suspensão da descrença que não possuo. 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 here that the book grabs you by the heartstrings and refuses to let go by delivering,first a revaluation about one character that, while obvious given the books setting, is presented in such a skillful way that the heartbreak feels utterly real. And then the pestilential stench reaches us from the field strewn with corpses, the stink of a slaughterhouse mingled with gunpowder. Finally, the third part is more of a conclusion, since the climactic point of the book is actually at the end of the second part, and the third part serves as a nice way of tying things together.

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. Maybe due to a rather lackluster translation, or the longueurs of the war-related sections, but it didn't seem to have the propulsive quality of his other two books -albeit at 166 pages it only took me a day and a half to read it. It is also the story of 16 yr old Vincent’s coming of age and loss of innocence under the most devastating of circumstances. 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.Perhaps what is most striking is the idea that the characters have real emotions too, and they are human as well, like the rest of the population. As both relationships develop Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer and far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. This novel will undoubtedly become one of the books that will never leave me and stay on my shelf until the day I die. Part Three offers the inevitable tragic conclusion and a sting in the tail that is so contrived that it strikes the reader as ridiculous.