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Madeleine Bourdouxhe (1906–1996)

Forfatter af La femme de Gilles

12 Værker 377 Medlemmer 17 Anmeldelser 1 Favorited

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Includes the name: Madeleine Bourdouxhe

Image credit: Madeleine Bourdouxhe

Værker af Madeleine Bourdouxhe

La femme de Gilles (1937) — Forfatter — 198 eksemplarer
Marie (1943) 83 eksemplarer
A Nail, a Rose; and other stories (1989) 23 eksemplarer
Verzameld werk (1937) 16 eksemplarer
Sous le pont Mirabeau (1996) 12 eksemplarer
Anna 1 eksemplar
Clara 1 eksemplar

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Kanonisk navn
Bourdouxhe, Madeleine
Fødselsdato
1906-09-25
Dødsdag
1996-04-16
Køn
female
Nationalitet
Belgium
Fødested
Lüttich, Belgien
Liege, Belgium
Bopæl
Liège, Belgium (birth)
Brussels, Belgium (death)
Paris, France
Erhverv
novelist
Kort biografi
Madeleine Bourdouxhe was born to a middle-class family in Liège, Belgium. In 1914, she moved with her parents to Paris, where they lived for the duration of World War I. She spent the rest of her childhood between the two countries. She went to Brussels to study languages and philosophy. In 1927, she married Jacques Muller, a mathematics teacher with whom she had a daughter. The publication of her novel La femme de Gilles (1937) brought her fame. At the outbreak of World War II, she fled with her husband and baby to a small village near Bordeaux, but was forced to return to Brussels. There the couple became active in the Belgian Resistance.
After the war, she traveled regularly to Paris, frequenting the cafés patronized by her friends and fellow writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Raymond Queneau and by painters such as René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. Madeleine Bourdouxhe's work was rediscovered by feminist literary critics in the 1980s, resulting in new editions and translations. She was the subject of a 2004 documentary, Une lumière la nuit: Un portrait de Madeleine Bourdouxhe by Nadia Benzekri, her granddaughter.

Medlemmer

Anmeldelser

I'd actually checked this out from the library once before, but ended up returning it before I got around to reading it. I decided to make another attempt for Women in Translation month. And woo, did I have a lot of feelings about it once I'd read it. In fact, I'd spent too much time thinking and talking about this book at the time that I was convinced I'd written a review long before I actually did.

This is one of those books where you (or I guess me) spend a lot of time wanting to give pretty much every character a good, vigorous shake. "What are you doing?" I wanted to yell at them. "How do you foresee your current course of action turning out?" I suppose that's to be expected in a book where, within the first twenty pages, the main character realizes her husband is having an affair with her sister and decides to pretend she doesn't know and just carry on normally until he comes to his senses?

But of course, it doesn't take very long to realize that none of her other choices are any good anyway. Her sister is terrible, her mother (though she doesn't know the full circumstance) babies her sister. A priest assigns her prayers of penitence and cautions against rebelling against His plans. And though Elisa spends endless time analyzing, buffering, and trying to manage Gilles's emotional state, it's soon clear that Gilles does not see Elisa as a person with any interiority at all -- she is merely what she does for him.

Of course I rooted for Elisa to rebel, to run away, but how could she? The final ending, sickening as it was, was also a kind of relief.

Both the Introduction and Afterword were incredibly helpful for contextualizing and processing this painful little story. As much as it hurt, I'm glad I gave it a second chance. A powerful novel.
… (mere)
1 stem
Markeret
greeniezona | 12 andre anmeldelser | Nov 14, 2020 |
I wonder how many people would not have lived the part of one character or another in this brief discourse on betrayal? The husband who suddenly discovers an overwhelming passion for his sister-in-law. The sister-in-law who takes what she can from this whilst insolently uncaring about the devastation she wrecks. And the central character herself, the wife, who suddenly realises from the most trivial of information, that her husband and her sister are at it.

Rest here:

rel="nofollow" target="_top">https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/la-femme-de-gilles-by-mad...… (mere)
 
Markeret
bringbackbooks | 12 andre anmeldelser | Jun 16, 2020 |
I wonder how many people would not have lived the part of one character or another in this brief discourse on betrayal? The husband who suddenly discovers an overwhelming passion for his sister-in-law. The sister-in-law who takes what she can from this whilst insolently uncaring about the devastation she wrecks. And the central character herself, the wife, who suddenly realises from the most trivial of information, that her husband and her sister are at it.

Rest here:

rel="nofollow" target="_top">https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/la-femme-de-gilles-by-mad...… (mere)
 
Markeret
bringbackbooks | 12 andre anmeldelser | Jun 16, 2020 |
I wonder how many people would not have lived the part of one character or another in this brief discourse on betrayal? The husband who suddenly discovers an overwhelming passion for his sister-in-law. The sister-in-law who takes what she can from this whilst insolently uncaring about the devastation she wrecks. And the central character herself, the wife, who suddenly realises from the most trivial of information, that her husband and her sister are at it.

Rest here:

rel="nofollow" target="_top">https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/la-femme-de-gilles-by-mad...… (mere)
 
Markeret
bringbackbooks | 12 andre anmeldelser | Jun 16, 2020 |

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Associated Authors

Faith Evans Translator, Translator, Afterword
Elisa Albert Introduction
Michel Thorgall Introduction
Monika Schlitzer Translator

Statistikker

Værker
12
Medlemmer
377
Popularitet
#64,011
Vurdering
½ 3.7
Anmeldelser
17
ISBN
64
Sprog
9
Udvalgt
1

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