An achingly sad short story of a woman in her 60s living in an attic flat in Paris. She is both lonely and hungry but her mind is playful. She spends her small amount of money on a Metro ticket, rather than the food she needs, surviving on the coffee beans she counts out and a quarter of a sugar cube dissolved in water. Then, searching for an orange on a Parisian night she finds a fox fur and this brings comfort. Written as a stream of consciousness, the words are dense and packed with meaning. She observes life around her and fills her days watching and wandering. ( )

Beautiful and sad stream-of-consciousness story of a prematurely-old poor woman in one of the largest and most affluent cities in the world. Saying that Paris is a character in the story is cliché but apposite, as the main character invests her perceptual world of things with feelings and numen. The sadness of the story resides in the reader as observer, the main character manifesting acceptance and a fragile indomitability of spirit, psychological defenses not far from delusion. ( )

To make one more last contribution to #WITMonth, today I read a short novella called The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc, first published in 1965 and translated from the French by Derek Coltman.

(I had been a bit ambitious in thinking that I had time to finish A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding by Amanda Svensson (translated by Nichola Smalley). Life has conspired to get in the way of reading time this past week...)

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is one of Penguin's European Writers series: it's a series of seven (so far) and I bought the lot when I first heard about them. (Except for Death in Spring by Mercé Rodoreda, (translated by Martha Tennent because I had already read and reviewed the Open Letter Books edition at the beginning of this #WITMonth). The titles are all bite-sized short stories and novellas, representing authors from France, Spain, Germany , Sweden, Romania, Greece and Italy.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is only 80 pages long and can be read in an afternoon, though its impact will last much longer than that. It affected me in the same way that reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger did (see my review). Hamsun's protagonist is a distressed young man at the end of his physical and psychological tether. His circumstances are different to Leduc's old lady's but like her, he is starving in an impersonal city, and like her, he suffers hallucinations which blur with reality.

Leduc's nameless old lady is sixty (which doesn't seem so very old to me), but she is alone and friendless. Her sole companion is an insect in the skirting board of her room.

She was a sack of stones holding itself up of its own volition, this woman who had never had anything, who had never asked for anything. If the edge of the wind had caressed her neck at that moment, had caressed her neck just below the ear, then her heart would have stopped. She would have given her life and her death for another's breath that close. (p.38)

She uses her few francs for a ticket for the train — not to take a journey, but to be in company with other people, even though they ignore her.

She has developed rituals and routines to get through her long lonely days, and she plans carefully to eke out her pitiful store of money. This is how the story begins:

Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six... the the roar. The table shook, the coffee beans fell into her lap.

The overhead Métro was an invader she had never grown used to, though it shook her like that every five minutes during off-hours, every two minutes during rush hours. (p.1)

That astonishing image is just one of many arresting images. As Deborah Levy says in the introduction, Leduc is incapable of coming up with a boring sentence, and it's true.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/08/31/the-lady-and-the-little-fox-fur-by-violetta-... ( )

« Malgré "les larmes et les cris", les livres de Violette Leduc sont "ravigotants" — elle aime ce mot — à cause de ce que j'appellerai son innocence dans le mal, et parce qu'ils arrachent à l'ombre tant de richesses. Des chambres étouffantes, des coeurs désolés; les petites phrases haletantes nous prennent à la gorge : soudain un grand vent nous emporte sous le ciel sans fin et la gaieté bat dans nos veines. Le cri de l'alouette étincelle au-dessus de la plaine nue. Au fond du désespoir nous touchons la passion de vivre et la haine n'est qu'un des noms de l'amour.»

I love this book. ( )