This is the highly enjoyable story, made into a famous film by François Truffault in 1962, of a complicated love-triangle between two close friends and a woman (played memorably by Jeanne Moreau). And yet it is also far more than that; the book is a real examination of the complexity of love and of women. The women who appear here are generally from a Bohemian milieu and are extremely independent, single-minded and liberated, whether they are more sensual, sensitive, intellectual or practical types by nature. Sometimes, rather at the expense of the male heroes, they relentlessly pursue powerful desires to love, mate, have children and then often wish to escape from the emotional worlds they have themselves created.


Roché’s characters have the contradictory, self-defeating vices (and charm) of real people rather than the flattened, symbolic, moralised behaviour of people in less successful fiction than Jules and Jim. The reader is seduced too by the glamour of its world (a turn-of-the-century Paris of artists and their followers) and all the beautiful, spirited people of various nations that fill it.


Jules and Jim both celebrates and laments love, following all the twists and turns of those trying to live out their sexuality without double standards, playing with jealousy and the need to punish the beloved — ‘whenever Jim was too happy she was under a compulsion to strike him down’ and the fundamental problem for all human beings in love — ‘They weren’t reasonable people.’


For both men and women this is a fascinating book for its exploration of the realities of liberated love, voluptuous and full of pleasures...

‘...he was in the same case as Jack and perhaps as all other men: they were all straws in the blazing fire of their womens’ beauty.’ p189