Can I read The Stepson on EtoBox?

The Stepson by Emmanuel Bove is a work of fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Stepson about?

On one level, The Stepson is the tale of a young man's infatuation with his stepmother, a well-placed bourgeoise with painterly ambitions, of that young man's replication of his father's life (low-class affair, illegitimate son, marriage); and of his own successive marriages and affairs, none of which work. At a much deeper level, it is a study of what Russians call (after Goncharov's novel) oblomovschina, the paralysis of the will. Jean-Noel, the stepson in question, is a nullity with ambitions as long as he needn't do anything to advance them. He doesn't act, he undergoes. It is the intricate, tortuously rationalized play of his passivity before fate (an awful biological mother, a dreadful, deprived younger brother; young women, on an ascending social scale, who want to fill his void) that makes this one of Bove's most fascinating novels, a sort of tragic bedroom farce. . Bove is the Proust of the lower orders, of the defeated, of collective anonymity; he is all circumstance, context, distance. His style is a form of hyper-objectivity; his world bathes in a light where events always just fail to be understood. We should be grateful that forty years after the oblivion into which h

Who reads The Stepson?

Author

Emmanuel Bove

Publisher

The Marlboro Press, Inc.

Published

1994

Language

EN

ISBN

9781568970059

Category

work of fiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Romance, Thriller

Rating

4.3 / 5 (7,889 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14