Emmanuel Bove, born in Paris as Emmanuel Bobovnikoff, died in his native city on Friday 13 July 1945, the night on which all of France prepared for the large-scale celebration of the first 'quatorze juillet' since World War II. He would probably have taken no part in the festivities. Bove was known as a man of few words, a shy and discreet observer. His novels and novellas were populated by awkward figures, 'losers' who were always penniless. In their banal environments, they were resigned to their hopeless fate. Bove's airy style and the humorous observations made sure that his distressing tales were modernist besides being depressing: not the style, but the themes matched the post-war atmosphere precisely.

In the pall of confusion and sour unhappiness that has descended upon France after its swift and overwhelming defeat, Joseph Bridet, Bove's colorless hero, is at uneasy sixes and sevens. Vaguely he wishes to do something for himself, to "stand up and do something for his country": he forms the notion of going to London, of joining De Gaulle's forces there. But for the papers he needs in order to leave France he decides to go to Vichy, to pass himself off as a zealous Petainiste eager to serve the regime, and to get himself posted somewhere abroad. Once there he will figure out how to proceed to England.

Things do not work out well for Bridet. Not that sure of himself, he fails to convince others. And the growing doubts and fears he exudes, the recurring panics he cannot conceal, render him pitiable and suspect. The world of bureaucratic Vichy, a quicksand he has stepped into, is a world of suspicion and no pity. A mediocrity, ever more contemptible in his own eyes, Bridet is ultimately in profound agreement with this hateful world. He does not deserve to be saved, and he knows it. Perhaps most distressing of all to Bove's hero is the discovery, not merely that he is finally worthless, but that others are no better than he.

Bove, a masterful stylist, is today recognized as probably the most important of the less well-known French writers of this century. Quicksand first appeared in 1945, a few months after his death.