From the Publisher
Violette Leduc was born the illegitimate daughter of a servant seduced by the son of the house. Growing up in the coldhearted glare of her mother, she suffered the guilt of having been born unwanted. In her thirties, during World War II, Leduc worked as a black-marketeer in a village in Normandy. There she shared a cottage with Maurice Sachs, an elegant, snobbish homosexual with whom she fell in love - the first of several such doomed affairs. It was Sachs who advised her to write of her childhood, the pain of her youth, and her passionate, tragic liaisons with women. In postwar Paris, Violette took up her station at the famed Cafe de Flore and began her worship of Simone de Beauvoir, who soon became her benefactor and most devastating critic. Though Violette was at the center of left-wing literary society, she struggled for two decades before achieving "overnight" notoriety from her autobiographical writings. With her self-appointed biographer as our guide, we follow Leduc to her beloved Provence, where she lived out her life, her success hard-won, her terror of loneliness unassuaged.
Publishers Weekly
Violette Leduc is an all-but-forgotten writer whose work was enormously respected by her contemporaries, French intellectuals and writers like Sartre, Cocteau and de Beauvoir. According to Zachheim's first novel, which might more accurately be described as a fusion of creative biography and fictional autobiography, Leduc was a neurotic, possessive woman, who, for example, spent much of WWII in Paris's Caf de Flore spying on Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote there daily. Leduc wrangles her way into the feminist's life; and into an obsessive "friendship" which for Leduc involves a great deal of hysterical crying. The narrative is told by Leduc's nameless biographer, a contemporary middle-aged woman who has gone to Paris to do research and interview one of Leduc's closest friends, Lili Jacobs. Most of the book's plot involving Leduc takes place within the past-tense brackets of Lili Jacobs's memories, as Jacobs and the biographer meet and talk in such Parisian landmarks as Les Deux Magots. The biographer, who, like Zackheim, lives in New Mexico and is a visual artist, expresses her strong empathy with Leduc's belief that "My ugliness will set me apart until I die," as well as with the writer's extraordinary vulnerability and her beautiful literary rendition of it. Overall, this is a quiet, moderately well-written book, with occasional flashes of fascinating materialsuch as when Leduc, after achieving critical and commercial success in the 1960s, self-consciously interviews Brigitte Bardot for Vogue. (The biographer compares this event with a childhood dinner she had with Marilyn Monroe.) But the often dry, biography-style prose never quite brings to life either the strange, fascinating Leduc or the biographer who so closely identifies with her. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Artist Zackheim's debut novel uses a famiiar device, that of "detecting" fictional writer Violette LeDuc of wartime and postwar France and bringing her life to light. Sifting through the layers is a slow and sometimes tedious process, yet as the seemingly insignificant pieces, anecdotes, hastily scribbled notes, and actual writings appear, a life begins to take shape. Bare bones take on flesh; flesh takes on the subtle shadings of personality. Despite the sometimes formulaic writing, Zackheim has created multiple stories within the story, but we also come to know the "stories" of the biographer and of Lili Jacobs, one of Violette's friends, who is the keeper of LeDuc's correspondence and manuscripts. Lili's nightly stories of Violette's life, the "embrace" of Paris and LeDuc's contemporariesde Beauvoir, Sartre, Cocteau, and Gnetbecome palpable to the reader. Although the narrator remains, at times, almost transparent, the richness of place and time make this a good first novel. Recommended for larger public libraries.Kathleen Marszycki, Rathbun Free Memorial Lib., Wethersfield, Ct.
BookList
French writer Violette Leduc, a contemporary of Simone de Beauvior and Jean Genet, was a fixture of Paris' cafescene, writing and rewriting her personal history in relative obscurity until the publication of her novel "La Batarde" in 1965. When the book was nominated for the Prix Goncourt for fiction, the jury dropped it from consideration after deciding it was not fiction at all but autobiography. Now an unnamed American biographer has arrived in Paris to interview Lili Jacob, an old friend of Violette's. Lili's recollections of Nazi-occupied France (she was active in the Resistance, Violette sold butter on the black market) segue seamlessly into accounts of the biographer's travels, from walking alone in Auschwitz to lying in George Sand's bed, as the biographer tries to understand her own life by understanding Violette's. With all the weighty themes Zackheim has taken on--the slippery nature of autobiography, the Holocaust, mothers and daughters--it's not surprising that the parallels she draws are sometimes forced. Overall, though, she succeeds in weaving them together.
Kirkus Reviews
A muted and uninvolving first novel that juxtaposes the life and career of a neglected French writer, Violette Leduc (190772), with the purportedly parallel story of the woman who attempts to write her biography.
Zackheim's unnamed narrator, a painter whose marriage and career have rescued her from a traumatic girlhood, travels to Paris to research the life of Leduc, a now nearly forgotten figure who emerged from an obscure youth to become the intimate companion of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, and other famous postwar literary figures, and the author of a justly celebrated autobiography (La Bâtarde), among other books. The narrator's "research" is limited to her meetings with Lili Jacobs, an elderly Parisienne who with her husband knew Leduc during WW II. Their conversations about the war and the Resistance alternate with the narrator's unsurprising recollections of her own unhappy youth, restless "pilgrimages," and her family's complex European Jewish heritage. The protagonist's deep respect for the courage with which Leduc surmounted her own ignoble past (she was born illegitimate), lack of physical beauty, and years of poverty to become one of the most respected writers of her time fuels her own writing. But we aren't shown this: We're told it, in exhausting conversations and workmanlike summaries of facts Zackheim has all too obviously culled from sources listed in her "novel's" perhaps unintentionally revealing bibliography. Leduc, who surely was genuinely fascinating, is scarcely visible here. Instead we're given vague, clichéd paeans to Leduc's sensitivity and originality ("To Violette sexuality was an embrace of her life"). Only in the final 60 pages, when long-delayed information on the specifics of Leduc's life is finally conveyed, do we get a fleeting sense of the emotional urgency and intellectual drama that the writer's embattled life suggests.
The subject has great intrinsic interest, but the challenge of communicating something essential about Leduc, or about the sources of her art, has not been met here. A real disappointment.
What People Are Saying
Gretel Ehrlich
"Like a candlelit night in Parisian cafe...an intriguing lead."
Kate Millett
"Adventure...a thrilling mix of fact and fiction."
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