Violette Leduc Livres

A printemps 1948, V. Leduc, encouragée par S. de Beauvoir, entame la rédaction de ce texte auquel elle consacre trois années. Il constituait la première partie, censurée au début des années 1950, de son roman Ravages. Il paraît, sous une forme elle aussi censurée, en 1966. Il s'agit ici du texte intégral du récit de la passion de deux collégiennes.

The extraordinary first novel from Violette Leduc, praised by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet.

"An old woman lives alone in a tiny attic flat in Paris, counting out coffee beans every morning beneath the roar of the overhead metro. Starving, she spends her days walking around the city, each step a bid for recognition of her own existence. She rides crowded metro carriages to feel the warmth of other bodies, and watches the hot batter of pancakes drip from the hands of street-sellers. One morning she awakes with an urgent need to taste an orange; but when she rummages in the bins she finds instead a discarded fox fur scarf. The little fox fur becomes the key to her salvation, the friend who changes her lonely existence into a playful world of her own invention."-Book cover

Charged with metaphors, alternating with precise descriptions of sensations and human relationships, 'Thérèse and Isabelle' was censored by its publisher in France in 1954, first published in a truncated version in 1966 and not until 2000 in its uncensored edition, as Violette Leduc intended. "I'm trying to express as exactly, as minutely as possible the sensations of physical love. There's something here that a woman can understand. I hope this won't appear more scandalous than the thoughts of Molly Bloom at the end of Joyce's Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis deserves to be heard, I think." Violette Leduc For the first time in a new English translation, here is the unabridged text of 'Thérèse and Isabelle'. Admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute and Albert Camus, Violette Leduc (1907-1972) was championed by Simone de Beauvoir when she published her scandalous autobiography 'La Batarde' (1964). Like 'Thérèse and Isabelle', many of her audacious novels are largely inspired by her life. Her vibrant and lyrical prose continues to fascinate new generations of writers around the world.