Tuesday, 30 May 2017

La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc

If you've ever felt that you're 'too clingy', I would highly recommend this book, because Violette Leduc is guaranteed to make you feel like you will never be able to compete with her in terms of over-dependency and attachment. I had a very hard time with this book because there's no denying that Leduc's writing is gorgeous and powerful, but her personality is incredibly annoying. She is masochistically in love with failure; she seems to be obsessed with destroying her life and relationships. I felt like she loves being pitied to such an extent that she demands that her readers pity her, as well as everyone in her life. And it's always all about her, she seems to be constantly trying to prove that her suffering is worse than anyone else's, and if she isn't suffering enough, she will simply cry until she's ill. On the other hand, her writing is incredibly touching, powerful, erotic and poetic. But after 400+ pages, I just found myself wondering, at what point does poetry degenerate into whining? It's a very modern book in some ways, since it deals with issues of sexuality and gender, but it's also very confusing, since it's often hard to understand Leduc's decisions and follow her logic (or lack thereof). It's also related to the French feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, who I have a dislike of, so many passages that deal explicitly with femininity and 'being a woman' I found very annoying. For instance, Leduc often locates her hysterical and irrational impulses within her explicitly female body (writing things like 'screaming with my ovaries' or something of the sort), which is something that I find really degrading, both to herself and to women in general.

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