The fire within

Summary/Review: "This documentary novel was written shortly after the suicide of a close friend of Drieu La Rochelle. Set in a sanatorium during the early 1930s, this is an account of the last forty-eight hours in the life of a young French drug addict, Alain. It is, in effect, a sober meditation on suicide, and a scathing attack on a society which, in the author's eyes, is perched on the brink of moral and intellectual bankruptcy"--