"La Belle lurette" - Jeu complet des premières épreuves de son premier livre

Complete set of uncorrected galley proofs dating from August–September 1935, comprising 65 pages on as many leaves numbered in pencil from 1 to 65.

First set of galley proofs for Henri Calet's debut novel La Belle Lurette (Gallimard, October 1935), forwarded to the author by Gallimard in the summer of 1935.

"On 15 June 1935, in a small room on the rue Edgar-Poe, close to the Buttes-Chaumont, Calet completed the writing of his first book, La Belle Lurette, which appeared in November of that same year with Gallimard, with the support of Jean Paulhan. The book met with little commercial success, yet Calet earned the esteem of distinguished peers from Gide to Valéry Larbaud, by way of Max Jacob and Eugène Dabit; among the reviews welcoming the young writer's debut, some even spoke of a 'masterpiece' or 'the novel of a generation'.

It was nonetheless a lean, raw, and brutal book, in which the author cynically recounted a cruel slice of life: a veritable epic of misfortune and abjection, into which he inscribed in black ink the most sordid episodes of his family origins. A book full of bile, yet also full of humour and vitality, from which there arose nonetheless a mysterious lyricism free of periods or cadences. All of this, moreover, was carried by a style one can only describe as exceptional: an arguably unprecedented cocktail in literary history, compounded of lapidary formulations, savage ellipses, colloquial expressions, wordplay, and short-circuits of every kind, the whole clinched by a distinctive typographical arrangement. Calet subsequently published Le Mérinos in 1937, and Fièvre des polders just before the war; yet La Belle Lurette is today unquestionably regarded as the masterpiece of his darker creations. The work has been continuously reprinted in Gallimard's 'L'Imaginaire' series since 1979. In its present state, it constitutes a document at once precious and fascinating, for it is nothing less than a literary masterpiece in the raw..." (Jean-Pierre Baril)