Despite all of the desire that flows in and out of these pages, La Batarde does not gratify. Leduc refuses to stoop to pander to panting hearts - she simply gives you words of poetry to describe her ugliness, her love affairs, small joys and solitude. And yet, she is not all poetry. She is experimental, and is relentless is driving forth her need to tell you about what a horrible being she is - and yet in the end, you find that you feel not only sympathy but a aching heart when she falls and rises again.
From her childhood trials in provincial France, to her affairs with her classmate Isabelle and her teacher Hermine, to her forced departure to Paris (for being found out with her affairs with the music teacher), to her discovery of Gabriel, to her abortions and black-market activity during World War II, the character that Violette portrays herself is no saint, but in refusing to give herself some pride she emerges as a martyr - of fate (being born with, as she says, an ugly nose). There is no question about her ugliness - even de Beauvoir is reputed to have made fun of her behind her back. Yet this woman must have had charisma, for designers gave her clothign to wear and show off on the streets. A contradiction, this woman was, and this quality of hers is very much shown to the reader in her autobiography.

From her early beginnings with a distant mother to her activities during World War II in the black market, Violette Leduc opens her life to us in stark detail. On her journey to find her voice and become a writer, she experiences life to its fullest and darkest extents. From her love affairs with women to her failed marriage to her adoration of a gay man, she explores her seemingly tragic life to show us the beauty in every molecule of life. Definitely not a slow read, this memoir proves Leduc's mastery of expression and whets the reader's appetite for more self-spelunking.

Violette Leduc invented her own poetics of solitude. Her writings are the ravings of a mad schoolgirl, feverishly and sensually neurotic, and achingly romantic. As unhappy as Violette claims to be, you want to be her, to have her heights of perception, and to desire as intensely as she does. If you like it light and breezy, skip this writer. But if you like to take that queasy peek behind the mask, this is for you.

Like her "La Batarde", Leduc delves into her psyche and chronicles her moods, obsessions, and madness for the nuggets of insight they can contain. With astonishing honesty and ability, she serves us a remarkable and lush memoir of a writer plagued by self-doubt. Another fascinating aspect of the book is Violette's one-sided love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, and Violette's friendships with the varied famous of the time. This is a book to hold close and chew slowly.

I discovered this novel after discovering Violette Leduc. I adore this book for its fleshing out of Leduc's life. It gives a lush and warm sense of her life and her version of madness, as well as the narrator's investigation into her own Jewish heritage. In some places, Zackheim's writing mirrored Leduc's. There's so little written about Leduc, which is such a tragedy.

Nobody who has read any of Violette Leduc's turgid quasi-autobiographies puts down the book indifferently: it is either thrown across the room or fondled and lovingly put in a safe place. And those of us who have become scholars of her work find ourselves so drawn to this enigmatic woman who told all and revealed nothing that she becomes more than an object of study - she becomes part of our lives. French novelist and philosopher Rene de Ceccatty has been no exception. While writing his Doctoral thesis on Leduc, he found himself so bitten by the Leduc bug that he wrote 'L'Eloge de la Batarde' - an autobiographical "bris de miroir" (to use his own term for Leduc's writing) which is part literary essay, part self-indulgent leducian kiss-and-tell in its noblest form, part biography of Leduc and totally defiant of genre.

The title refers to Leduc's best-known and most popular work, 'La Batarde', which tells the story of her life from her birth in 1912 to her experiences as a black marketeer after WWII and her struggles growing up as an illegitimate child with a demanding and often cruel mother. Since it was published in the 60's, the book has been in turn praised and ridiculed, and the subject of much discussion and commentary.

In 'Eloge', de Ceccatty details some of his experiences as a postgraduate philosophy student, falling in love with his mentor and experiencing the same impossibility and thwarted passion that Leduc felt for Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir. He also describes the extent of his fascination with the inscrutable author in a way that no ordinary biographer would. While the lives of de Ceccatty and Leduc are very different, the former manages to find parallels and points of contact and weave them into a loose yet coherent tangle of narratives, as candid and fresh as Violette could have written herself.

Even for someone who has never read Violette Leduc's work, this book is a fascinating story of obsession. For the (francophone) Leduc fan, it is an indispensable reference work bringing fresh insight to one of the world's most underrated authors.