‘Embryonic’: lost novel by French film-maker Éric Rohmer is republished — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Maurice Schérer wrote Élisabeth in 1942 at age 24 while working as a freelance journalist in Nazi-occupied Paris, publishing under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier to shield his Catholic family from the novel's scandalous themes of young lovers, age-gap affairs, and semi-incestuous flirtations.
- Élisabeth initially flopped and slipped out of print, prompting Schérer to adopt a second pseudonym — Éric Rohmer — and abandon literature; as he later put it: "I didn't believe in literature any longer. I felt its time had passed [and] that cinema had supplanted it."
- Rohmer's lost novel has been republished in an English translation by Aaron Kerner, eight decades after its first publication and 16 years after the director's death, with a foreword by novelist André Aciman.
- The New Yorker's Richard Brody praised the book as "a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar," calling it a crucial origin story for the director of Claire's Knee, The Green Ray, and My Night at Maud's.
- André Aciman described Élisabeth as "embryonic and full of Rohmerian moments," arguing that themes Rohmer would later refine on screen — "the study of human behaviour and our unpredictable natures" — are already present in the prose.
- Critic Adrian Martin revealed Rohmer kept his filmmaking career a secret from his parents throughout his adult life — they believed he was a teacher, since film-making "would have been seen as a bit of a dirty profession."
- Rohmer's filmmaking method was built on small crews (sometimes three or four people) and improvisation; Martin says Rohmer "didn't like to do multiple takes" and would sometimes yell "Just do it!" from the next room rather than direct actors.
Why it matters: For film scholars and Rohmer devotees, the republication offers the only direct window into the literary mind of a director who insisted "I didn't believe in literature any longer" — letting readers trace his signature themes of hyper-rationalized desire and footloose youth from his 1939-set prose to films like Claire's Knee and Pauline à la Plage. Aciman's framing of Élisabeth as "embryonic" gives the book canonical status beyond mere curiosity.
Ask SkimNews
