Novel with Cocaine

The story of an adolescent's cocaine addiction, Novel with Cocaine relates the formative experiences of its antihero, Vadim, at school and with women before turning to the experience of drug abuse itself and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although it makes little explicit reference to the Revolution, the novel's obsession with cruelly addictive forms of thinking finds great resonance in the historical setting that forms its background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name."