The Thief

Made into a 1967 film by Louis Malle and never before available in English, this classic of anarchist literature follows a once well-to-do young man forced into an itinerant life of crime. Over the years, however, this picaresque masterpiece with shades of black comedy has found a growing number of admirers, from the surrealist Georges Randal is the titular thief, a young Frenchman of good family who, having been deprived of his inheritance by a conniving uncle, takes to a life of crime. Moving between London, Brussels, and Paris, in a world of hookers, drifters and grifters, revolutionaries and politicians, bankers and thieves, he is in a position to reveal modern society in all its teeming corruption. The thief is no hero. Like everyone else in this decadent society, he is a trafficker and exploiter--and a wounded soul. At least, however, he has the courage of his disaffection, his fury warmed by self-hatred. And he does seem a somewhat distant cousin of Robin Hood, targeting the wealthy and helping the needy when the opportunity arises. After more than a hundred years, Georges Darien’s vision of our fallen modern world--the inhuman comedy he proposed to set beside Balzac’s human one--seems especially pertinent to our current Gilded Age. Jacques Houis’s new translation is the first ever into English.

Auteur
Georges Darien (1862–1921) was a writer and noted anarchist. He directed the anarchist weekly periodical L’Escarmouche in the late nineteenth century. His novels have served as the source material for several films, most notably Louis Malle’s The Thief of Paris, adapted from Darien’s The Thief.

Jacques Houis is a translator, writer, editor, and former teacher in New York City. His translations include Paul Scarron’s The Comic Romance, Paolo Mieli’s Figures of Space, and Jean-Pierre Cléro’s Lacan and the English Language.

André Breton (1896–1966) was a writer and cofounder of the French surrealist movement. With Philippe Soupault, he coauthored the first book of automatic writing, The Magnetic Fields, which was published in a new translation by NYRB Poets in 2020.