≡ Descargar La Bâtarde Batarde French Literature Violette Leduc Derek Coltman Deborah Levy Simone de Beauvoir Books

La Bâtarde Batarde French Literature Violette Leduc Derek Coltman Deborah Levy Simone de Beauvoir Books

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La Bâtarde Batarde French Literature Violette Leduc Derek Coltman Deborah Levy Simone de Beauvoir Books

I had never heard of much less read violette Leduc.then by chance I happened to watch a film called violette on Netflix.i was captivated by the story and tracked down this book on amazon.i could not set it down.basically her biography from birth till the end of wwll in france,the style is unlike anything I have read before.her flow of writing is a jazz like stream of consciousnesss that is totally immersive.though autobiographical her story reads like a Kafkaesque fairy-tale compounded of elements from Cinderella and jack-in-the-beanstalk.i can only say that I am extremely glad that I took the chance to watch an unknown film one rainy afternoon.


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La Bâtarde Batarde French Literature Violette Leduc Derek Coltman Deborah Levy Simone de Beauvoir Books Reviews

even for a used book this book had no signs of aging and appeared news, no yellowing, no tears or bends, and no underlining or highlights.
Despite all of the desire that flows in and out of these pages, La Batarde does not gratify. Leduc refuses to stoop to pander to panting hearts - she simply gives you words of poetry to describe her ugliness, her love affairs, small joys and solitude. And yet, she is not all poetry. She is experimental, and is relentless is driving forth her need to tell you about what a horrible being she is - and yet in the end, you find that you feel not only sympathy but a aching heart when she falls and rises again.
From her childhood trials in provincial France, to her affairs with her classmate Isabelle and her teacher Hermine, to her forced departure to Paris (for being found out with her affairs with the music teacher), to her discovery of Gabriel, to her abortions and black-market activity during World War II, the character that Violette portrays herself is no saint, but in refusing to give herself some pride she emerges as a martyr - of fate (being born with, as she says, an ugly nose). There is no question about her ugliness - even de Beauvoir is reputed to have made fun of her behind her back. Yet this woman must have had charisma, for designers gave her clothign to wear and show off on the streets. A contradiction, this woman was, and this quality of hers is very much shown to the reader in her autobiography.
From her early beginnings with a distant mother to her activities during World War II in the black market, Violette Leduc opens her life to us in stark detail. On her journey to find her voice and become a writer, she experiences life to its fullest and darkest extents. From her love affairs with women to her failed marriage to her adoration of a gay man, she explores her seemingly tragic life to show us the beauty in every molecule of life. Definitely not a slow read, this memoir proves Leduc's mastery of expression and whets the reader's appetite for more self-spelunking.
First the beautiful, literary writing. Some samples from Leduc’s first experience of Paris as a girl from a rural area “I had invested so many miles of branching rails…. ‘You are shivering,’ my mother insisted. Because Paris is indifferent and large….Life in a capital is always nerve-wracking. Their jokes, their banter, and their accent were their way of compensating for it….A rain of lovers at midday. …Their temples kissed even when their lips didn’t meet….Miles of worries unwinding from one neighborhood to the next….Paris despite everything was a forest of shapely calves. Paris had a smell of scented armpits….The trace of anisette in the air…Their print dresses, their bodies more conspicuous than if they were unclothed….Paris had enslaved the four corners of the earth….A Japanese woman was pressing down upon the asphalt with her vermillion patterns.”

Almost all of Violette Leduc’s work is autobiographical. This work, “The Bastard,” a name we are told she used for herself, reflects her early life through the German occupation of France in WW II, although she wrote this book in 1964. Leduc was a bisexual who wrote about sex with such frankness that some of her work was censored or went unpublished. She had affairs with women and gay men and for a while was married to a straight man. She worked for a time as an editor and publicist in a mainstream Paris publishing house and many leading French writers became friends of hers and mentors Andree Gide, Simone de Beauvoir and George Bernanos (Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette). Camus, Sartre and Genet praised her writing. Folks like Collette, James Joyce and Vincent Van Gough have walk-on roles in the story. Her (non-sexual) affair with a gay man was Maurice Sachs who was writing Witches’ Sabbath at the time.

Leduc blamed her mother for her problems, but the reader, even with Leduc as prosecutor and no chance to hear from the defense, has a hard time seeing exactly what the problem was. Her mother supported her, took her in multiple times when she was down and out, and apparently stuck by her without a blink when she was expelled from a girl’s school for having an affair with a female teaching assistant, who was fired. Leduc felt she was ugly because she had a large nose. In her thirties she had an operation to reduce it but of course she was not satisfied. One of her lovers says to her “You will never be satisfied” and another tells her “You’re simply crammed with neuroses” but it goes beyond that the reader wonders how can a person try so hard to be unhappy and to be discontented? Leduc herself writes that she told her schoolmates “I said I shall be the anvil on which I forge my own sorrow.” They replied “Violette Leduc is nuts.” Another time Leduc writes “I missed the poverty and the nullity of my life in Paris.”

The story is essentially in three parts her childhood in a small French village in the early 1900’s; then her coming of age as a young woman on the Paris literary scene, and finally World War II when she and her Jewish gay male lover (they had a 9-year on- and off-again relationship) hide out in a rural village from the Nazis. During the war she becomes a black market entrepreneur and makes a lot of money by smuggling meat and butter to Paris by train. There’s a big gap in this chronology – all of WW I -- but perhaps that is because she annoyingly refers to her other works to fill in the gaps “I told that story in Ravages” she writes several times.

Final comments to give us one more psychological look at Leduc, look at the titles of some of her works. (My direct translations – some have modified titles after they were published in English) The Bastard; Ravages; Asphyxiation; Hunger; Hunting for Love; The Old Girl and Death. Nuts, but a great writer and a role model for later feminist and gay writers.
Arrived swiftly and in good condition -the author is one of Simone de Beauvoir's castoffs... For summer reading. Thank you.
I have been a henry miller fan for decades ... thank you Simone Beauvoir for introducing Violette ... she is off the charts ... absolutely phenomenal writer!!!! She stands unembarrassed along side Joyce and Miller ... how is it possible that she is practically unknown !!!!!!!!
For starters, Violette's prose is unmatched. If the point of art is catharsis Violette acts as the perfect mirror. A remarkable novel and wonderful read.
I had never heard of much less read violette Leduc.then by chance I happened to watch a film called violette on Netflix.i was captivated by the story and tracked down this book on .i could not set it down.basically her biography from birth till the end of wwll in france,the style is unlike anything I have read before.her flow of writing is a jazz like stream of consciousnesss that is totally immersive.though autobiographical her story reads like a Kafkaesque fairy-tale compounded of elements from Cinderella and jack-in-the-beanstalk.i can only say that I am extremely glad that I took the chance to watch an unknown film one rainy afternoon.