In the Absence of Men

"Charming, impudent, privileged, emotionally precocious, Vincent de I'Etoile is the same age as the young century when he meets the elegant, asthmatic forty-five-year-old Marcel Proust, and in one week - at literary salons, at the Ritz, in private rooms, in cafes - the striking youth with black hair and green eyes fashions an intimate platonic friendship with Parisian society's most eminent outsider." "It is 1916. For two years war has ravaged Europe, though to Vincent, in Paris, the tragedies in the French trenches are more remote than real, like whispered rumors, until one blindingly brilliant summer day - the same day that he befriends Marcel - the war assumes for Vincent the human face of Arthur Vales. The son of a family servant, once a schoolmaster and now a soldier on leave for a week from the front. Arthur awakens Vincent to the possibilities of erotic love as together they embark on a sensual journey that defies the sway of convention and the dominion of death." The week ends. Arthur returns to the front; Marcel, unexpectedly, is summoned to Illiers, where he revisits scenes of his childhood and in a potently imagined, affectingly realized series of letters shares with Vincent luminous remembrances of times past. And Vincent, abandoned in Paris, dazed by absence, continues an inevasible passage into a future that will be haunted always by the dark secret he uncovers behind the love he bears for both a doomed French infantryman and a famous middle-aged Jewish writer.