Bastard

Front Cover
Dalkey Archive Press, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 488 pages

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Batarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Batarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir -- like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
27
Section 3
28
Section 4
35
Section 5
36
Section 6
37
Section 7
39
Section 8
40
Section 22
136
Section 23
140
Section 24
171
Section 25
181
Section 26
206
Section 27
251
Section 28
271
Section 29
278

Section 9
43
Section 10
50
Section 11
61
Section 12
62
Section 13
66
Section 14
78
Section 15
81
Section 16
102
Section 17
106
Section 18
111
Section 19
113
Section 20
124
Section 21
127
Section 30
300
Section 31
329
Section 32
340
Section 33
365
Section 34
376
Section 35
384
Section 36
425
Section 37
445
Section 38
456
Section 39
485
Section 40
Section 41
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2003)

Violette Leduc had been publishing works of an autobiographical nature in France since 1945. But, aside from the enthusiastic support of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and certain other intellectuals, she had gone unnoticed until the publication of La Batarde (1964) propelled her to fame---in part, no doubt, for "the candor in the totally uninhibited descriptions of [her] Lesbian loves.... This, the story of [her] first forty years, is a courageous confession and a work of art,... a weird mixture of burning, naive, lucid, and unadorned sincerity... and of poetic inner monologue" (Henri Peyre, SR).