"Refreshing" ranks usually among the laziest qualifications a critique can come up with about a book, but right here and right now, for me, that seems to fit perfectly for Leduc: prefaced and defended by Simone de Beauvoir, she was a few years ago the subject of a (very poorly acted) biopic depicting her harsh and uncompromising existence, ranging from a traumatic childhood in the hands of her abusive mother (depicted in the present book) to black market during and after the war, before becoming the extremely controversial poster-child of worker-friendly feminism in the sixties while struggling ineffectively to eke a living as a writer.
She is one of those authors whose oeuvre is indistinguishable from her life, not because of self-control, refinement or irony, quite the contrary, but because the cathartic experience of writing had become a matter of life and death to work her way through a bitter present and a past she would never come to terms with. "L'Asphyxie" (I read it in the original French) is a messy collection of childhood memories, pungent with incomprehension, with resentment and probably with hatred. The grim quotidian of the French workers, with its pettiness and its absurdity, is twisted out of all proportions by the mind of a child, and its mediocre cast takes mythological dimensions. There are elements of surrealism trickling down into her child's world from the abject concerns of that of the adults.
Isn't it strange how we have come to subsume, with near modesty, all the crimes committed against children under the title "abuse" : they are all here, seen from up close or from afar, from sex maniacs to violent parents, from inhumane institutions to psychological harassment, and Leduc tells it without the slightest self-pity, without even any sense of the abnormality of her plight, but with a constant flow of wonderful, earthy metaphors, underlining the continuity between the author and her character.
Its a very short book and one that, beyond the fame by association earned by the author, must be read to be believed.