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ALBERT COSSERY (1913–2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life. The son of an illiterate mother and a newspaper-reading father with a private income from inherited property, Cossery was educated from a young age in French schools, where he received his baccalauréat and developed a love of classical literature. At age seventeen he made a trip to the French capital with the intention of continuing his studies there. Instead he joined the Egyptian merchant marine, eventually serving as chief steward on the Port Said–New York line. When he was twenty-seven his first book, Men God Forgot, was published in Cairo and, with the help of Henry Miller, in the United States. In 1945 he returned to Paris to write and live alongside some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Alberto Giacometti, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Genet. He was also, briefly, married to the actress Monique Chaumette. In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l’Académie française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la Société des gens de lettres. His books, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages, include The House of Certain Death, The Lazy Ones, and Proud Beggars.

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS has translated The Engagement by Georges Simenon and The Possession by Annie Ernaux.

JAMES BUCHAN’s latest novel is The Gate of Air.

The Jokers

Albert Cossery

Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis

Introduction by James Buchan

New York Review Books, New York

Contents

Cover

Biographical Note

Title Page

Introduction

The Jokers

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Copyright and more information

Introduction

ALBERT COSSERY is a novelist all on his own. As consistent in his themes as in his sedentary habits, he published every ten years or so of a long life a novel written in French and set (with a single exception) in Egypt.

Since his death in Paris in 2008, Cossery’s blend of low-life nostalgia and philosophical dandyism has won new readers in France and, in rather lesser numbers, in Egypt and Lebanon. This sparkling novel, first published as La violence et la dérision by Julliard in Paris in 1964, is the sixth of his nine books to be translated into English.

Cossery was born in 1913 in Cairo into a Greek Orthodox family with some private means. Educated in the French schools of Cairo, Cossery was drawn to both surrealism and Baudelaire and, at the age of eighteen, published a book of verse, Les morsures (Bites), which I have not been able to locate.

After a cruise as a ship’s steward to the United States, where he seems to have met Henry Miller, he published in Cairo in 1941 a book of five surrealist stories, Les hommes oubliés de Dieu, translated as Men God Forgot and praised by Miller. The book found its way to Algiers where it came to the attention of both Edmond Charlot, publisher of Albert Camus, and Camus himself. Cossery’s first novel, La maison de la mort certaine (translated as The House of Certain Death), came out in Cairo in 1944. With the liberation of Paris, Cossery moved there as did Charlot, who republished both books.

At some point, Cossery married. The marriage was a failure, though whether this was a cause or an effect of Cossery’s contempt for women, or both, I cannot tell. At the end of 1945, he installed himself in the hotel La Louisiane in the Latin Quarter, where he was to live (first in Room 58 and then in Room 70) for the next sixty years. Like his characters, Cossery rose late. He frequented literary cafés such as the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots and devoted himself to affairs of gallantry. His pose of extreme indolence concealed, as with Stevenson, a heroic industry.

The House of Certain Death, in which indigent tenants await the imminent and inevitable collapse of their slum house, sets out Cossery’s principal