A review by sabsey
La Batarde = The Bastard by Violette Leduc
5.0
“Oh God how I longed for a change, oh God how I longed to love her more than myself, oh God how I was beginning to love her, oh God how I longed for a kind of saintliness within our reach.”
La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc (The Bastard in English) is the self-unravelling whirlwind of a semi-autobiography, penned by the great, and greatly underrated French writer, Violette Leduc.
Published in 1964, it details the magnitude of Leduc’s love affairs between men and women alike, and the scope of her interior life; it is a magnification of the world spun like thread of Leduc’s world view – and it is a world view that is distinctly feminist, as well as dazzling, terrifying and utterly consuming.
“My blood beat against the mount of Venus on Isabelle’s palm. The hand moved up again: it was drawing circles, overflowing in the void, spreading its sweet ripples ever wider around my left shoulder. I was discovering the smoothness of my bones, the glow hidden in my flesh, the infinity of forms I possessed. The hand was trailing a mist of dreams across my skin. The heavens beg when someone strokes your shoulder: the heavens were begging now."
At 500 pages, the semi-autobiography tracks Leduc’s eternal struggle against the self – the wanting for everything and everyone in her life is enormous, and it’s something she is painfully and shamefully aware of.
Forever discontent, and eternally struggling to form herself outside of her abusive mother (and status as a ‘Bastard), the Violette Leduc of La Bâtarde is one that is perpetually chasing after her own shadow; she could never catch it, and if she did, she would find it lacking.
“I have a mother as blue as azure, I love her through my tragedy, I love her after the tragedy. My mother is a great wind from the ocean because she will not set foot in such filth.”
The plot itself is lacking, as the novel is first and foremost a character study, a reflection in a mirror fighting itself to get out for 38 years. The novel has a dizzying array of famous French figures and icons, and as she weaves her way through life, so to does she weave her way through many now iconic French authors of the 20th century.
Violette Leduc, as well as covering the scope of her career, focuses on the various romances with the two women and two men that dominated her private life (sometimes all at once) – like her relationship with her mother, she is forever trying to find herself outside of her relationships – and turns away as soon as she does.
"‘How much do you want?’ he asked finally.
In a dream, without illusion, automatically."
Violette Leduc’s struggle seems to be one that is universal and simultaneously distinctly unique as well; struggling to conform to gender, to not conform to gender, to be a woman, to be a man, to be a someone, to be a someone that matters, to own oneself, to own everything, to own nothing, to look in a mirror and recognise the image in it, to recognise and like the image in it.
“It’s you I’m talking to God. You’re not listening. How long will you stay away? I pray but I don’t get any better. I don’t get any worse. I drift along with the world. I shall humiliate other people without wanting to, and they will humiliate me without wanting to. I am among the living, and that’s my trump card. What is that buzzing? It’s the noise my ears make when they don’t want to be alone.”
While at times tedious – if only in the way that Leduc’s impervious attention to detail over just about everything is her strength and weakness – it is never dull, due to the vibrancy of her language, which is where the heart and talent of Leduc lies. Her language is everything Violette Leduc is: vivid and despondent and melancholy and passionate and aching – all at once.
She writes the world exactly as she sees it: in a way that no one else could.
Every sentence, every minor detail, is turn and spun and twisted so that the past – no matter how far Violette tries to get away from it – becomes her beginning and end – if only because she perceives it to be so.
La Bâtarde is a self-chronicle in hindsight; the moments of a woman’s life that have become emeshed with the idea of her self, the parts of the past that she is forever arriving into, that she is forever trying to form her self around. A lengthy and incredible novel that transcends the boundaries of language in as much as the author is trying to transcend the boundaries of her past.
“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.”
La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc (The Bastard in English) is the self-unravelling whirlwind of a semi-autobiography, penned by the great, and greatly underrated French writer, Violette Leduc.
Published in 1964, it details the magnitude of Leduc’s love affairs between men and women alike, and the scope of her interior life; it is a magnification of the world spun like thread of Leduc’s world view – and it is a world view that is distinctly feminist, as well as dazzling, terrifying and utterly consuming.
“My blood beat against the mount of Venus on Isabelle’s palm. The hand moved up again: it was drawing circles, overflowing in the void, spreading its sweet ripples ever wider around my left shoulder. I was discovering the smoothness of my bones, the glow hidden in my flesh, the infinity of forms I possessed. The hand was trailing a mist of dreams across my skin. The heavens beg when someone strokes your shoulder: the heavens were begging now."
At 500 pages, the semi-autobiography tracks Leduc’s eternal struggle against the self – the wanting for everything and everyone in her life is enormous, and it’s something she is painfully and shamefully aware of.
Forever discontent, and eternally struggling to form herself outside of her abusive mother (and status as a ‘Bastard), the Violette Leduc of La Bâtarde is one that is perpetually chasing after her own shadow; she could never catch it, and if she did, she would find it lacking.
“I have a mother as blue as azure, I love her through my tragedy, I love her after the tragedy. My mother is a great wind from the ocean because she will not set foot in such filth.”
The plot itself is lacking, as the novel is first and foremost a character study, a reflection in a mirror fighting itself to get out for 38 years. The novel has a dizzying array of famous French figures and icons, and as she weaves her way through life, so to does she weave her way through many now iconic French authors of the 20th century.
Violette Leduc, as well as covering the scope of her career, focuses on the various romances with the two women and two men that dominated her private life (sometimes all at once) – like her relationship with her mother, she is forever trying to find herself outside of her relationships – and turns away as soon as she does.
"‘How much do you want?’ he asked finally.
In a dream, without illusion, automatically."
Violette Leduc’s struggle seems to be one that is universal and simultaneously distinctly unique as well; struggling to conform to gender, to not conform to gender, to be a woman, to be a man, to be a someone, to be a someone that matters, to own oneself, to own everything, to own nothing, to look in a mirror and recognise the image in it, to recognise and like the image in it.
“It’s you I’m talking to God. You’re not listening. How long will you stay away? I pray but I don’t get any better. I don’t get any worse. I drift along with the world. I shall humiliate other people without wanting to, and they will humiliate me without wanting to. I am among the living, and that’s my trump card. What is that buzzing? It’s the noise my ears make when they don’t want to be alone.”
While at times tedious – if only in the way that Leduc’s impervious attention to detail over just about everything is her strength and weakness – it is never dull, due to the vibrancy of her language, which is where the heart and talent of Leduc lies. Her language is everything Violette Leduc is: vivid and despondent and melancholy and passionate and aching – all at once.
She writes the world exactly as she sees it: in a way that no one else could.
Every sentence, every minor detail, is turn and spun and twisted so that the past – no matter how far Violette tries to get away from it – becomes her beginning and end – if only because she perceives it to be so.
La Bâtarde is a self-chronicle in hindsight; the moments of a woman’s life that have become emeshed with the idea of her self, the parts of the past that she is forever arriving into, that she is forever trying to form her self around. A lengthy and incredible novel that transcends the boundaries of language in as much as the author is trying to transcend the boundaries of her past.
“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.”