Éric Rohmer, the French New Wave’s most prolific and beloved filmmaker’s first and only novel Elisabeth featuring witty banter, lust, ennui and an undercurrent of violence underlie a seemingly paradisiacal summer on the eve of World War II.

Fifteen years before completing his first feature film- and ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at Cahiers du cinema that would usher the journal, and French cinema, into a new era – the man who would become known worldwide as Éric Rohmer published a single novel. Released byÉditions Galimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Marguérite Duras, Élisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the nouveou romon- and was also the “matrix,” as rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.

Set in sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German. Invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer. Élisabeth is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and life to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already present- as it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace- their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies- with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.

The book uses a highly detached, objective narrator to tell the story of a loosely knit family gathering at Élisabeth’s house in the countryside around the town of Meaux, not far from Paris. It is set during the summer 1939, just weeks before France was sucked into the war with Germany. Yet you would hardly know it from the way Rohmer’s sharply sketched characters carry on: they bicker and flirt, swim in the Marne, take shelter from sudden bursts of rain, eat delicious fruit and in spite of some predatory behaviour generally don’t have a care in the world. All of its deftly shows that even on the brink of global destruction, humanity has a near-pathological knack of self-absorption.

Rohmer’s magpie eye capturing as well as anyone its aimless rituals and shortlived romances. Rohmer who died in 2010, explains adopting a “behaviourist” approach for Élisabeth that was inspired by American writers such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. It is there in the minutiae of his descriptions, the way he homes in materially on the body language of a doubting widow in love with a younger man.

“Her movements, like her words, were suffused with the same passive stiffness the same stubborn intractability of an ill-bound book, one that refuses to remain open unless folded back on itself until the glue in the spine cracks- the lifeless resistance of an object”.

“Withdrawing her hand, she sets the book on her belly, leans forward, and draws the skirt to midthigh, after a brief glance, she scratches with a fingernail. She pulls the skirt down again, crosses her legs and begins to read.” The girl in question happens to be called Claire, her knee  the object of that scratch.

Elisabeth by Éric Rohmer, translated by Aaron Kerner, McNally Editions £13.99/$19, 224 pages.