ABSTRACT
Jean Reverzy is one of those writers who make the history of postwar French literature seem insufficiently charted. A medical doctor in Lyons, he began writing in 1953, at the age of thirty-nine. The results of these first efforts were spectacular. This grim shift from romantic aspirations to a confrontation with harsh physical realities is a typical concern of this writer-physician whose patients inhabited the poorest quarters of Lyons. Reverzy was confronted daily with abject poverty, despair and illness. His several evocations of the routines of "a modest doctor attached to a sad suburb" are vivid and moving. Whether setting his stories in the South Seas or in a squalid district of Lyons, Reverzy was a talented realist. He meticulously describes medical examinations, and in the process adds a stark backdrop of scientific fact to what fascinates him the most: how human beings cope with the "metamorphosis of life as it slides toward corruption and death".
