Drieu La Rochelle and the Picture Gallery Novel: French Modernism in the Interwar Years - Hardcover

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, whose status as a political untouchable has obscured his contribution to literature, was a major figure in the modernist movement. He introduced the French reading public to the works of Hemingway, Lawrence, Huxley, and Malraux. He was the first prominent semiotic analyst of the music halls and circuses of Paris. And he wrote a widely acclaimed masterpiece, Glles, a realist collage of life in the twenties and thirties. In the first cohesive reading of all of Drieu's fiction, Rima Drell Reck takes a giant step toward rehabilitating the artistic reputation of this complex figure.
Reck's ground-breaking study illuminates Drieu's work without ignoring the profascist sympathies that led to its suppression. Reck insists that Drieu's novels be read for the first time in their artistic, rather than political context. Within that context, she identifies complex visual roots and technical innovations