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Commentary
When, in the morning, daybreak awakens us from a dream, we close our eyes and remain still, trying to recreate and continue the scene. But the day's light has destroyed everything: words are without sound, gestures without meaning. It is like a vanishing rainbow: some hues survive for an instant, disappear, seem to return: there is nothing left.
Commentary is a narrative--hovering between the genres of memoir, theory, and fiction--about a female artist whose abandonment by a lover precipitates a refiguration of her ideas on life, love and art. Sauvageot died of tuberculosis, after many stints in sanatoriums, at the age of 34. Commentaire was highly praised in its time by Paul Claudel, Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Charles Du Bos, Rene Crevel and Clara Malraux.
This edition is co-translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley (African Psycho) and Anna Moschovakis (The Jokers, The Possession).
Commentary is a narrative--hovering between the genres of memoir, theory, and fiction--about a female artist whose abandonment by a lover precipitates a refiguration of her ideas on life, love and art. Sauvageot died of tuberculosis, after many stints in sanatoriums, at the age of 34. Commentaire was highly praised in its time by Paul Claudel, Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Charles Du Bos, Rene Crevel and Clara Malraux.
This edition is co-translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley (African Psycho) and Anna Moschovakis (The Jokers, The Possession).
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1933
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About the author
Marcelle Sauvageot
4 books5 followersBorn in 1900, Marcelle Sauvageot was connected to the Surrealists by friendship, love, and artistic practice, but has been excluded from the dominant narrative about that movement until a reissue of her single book, Commentaire (initially retitled Laissez-Moi), was published in Paris in 2002, prompting a revival of interest in her work and inspiring a successful one-woman show in Paris. She died in 1934 of tuberculosis.
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September 21, 2014
(A Tale) is in parenthesis on the cover, silent and contained as the rage and confusion within. The story is simple: a woman, who is suffering from TB, travels to a sanatorium, where she receives a Dear Jane letter from her boyfriend. She is not only dumped, but he informs her that he is marrying someone else. She faces her illness alone. Imagine if Fanny Brawne had friend-zoned Keats before he departed to Italy to enter “his posthumous existence” (Keats’s own words there). The cruelty is devastating. The rest of the ‘tale’ is her private reflection on and response to the dead relationship. She cycles through all the emotions of grief: forced isolation, anger, not so much bargaining as rationalization, depression, and then acceptance.
Just as the greatest works of literature offer the reader a little bit of everything from the cupboard of genres, Commentary is many things: a funeral wreath of philosophical analyses; an attempt to explain perception; the tell-all un roman à clef, except these are lettres pas envoyées, for the text’s format is that of angry journal entries meant as letters not to be sent to the offending party. Commentary even offers an element of mystery: we do not know the narrator’s name. Readers don’t know if the text is fictional or autobiographical. There are hints, but no real key; it defies definitive interpretation. All that readers know for a name is her nickname for him: ‘Baby,’ and he gets boxed into several corners of her mind. In the end, from her “small corner of conscience,” she is done with him. She has excoriated him, herself, and the inherent blind nature of love. The ‘tale’ is less than one hundred pages long, a novella, and it is a tour de force deconstruction, a meditation, on love and the differences between the genders, and how the eyes deceive the heart.
I read both the translation and the original, which I was shocked to discover is available from Amazon for free. The French text is clean, free of errors, and a true labor of love from the folks at ebooksgratuits.com. Readers who don’t know French have to understand that French is an allusive and elusive language, and literary French is not the same as spoken French. I mention this for one simple reason: Sauvageot’s written French is colloquial, spare and lean, although there are limpid, periodic graces. She is not Proust nor does she want to imitate him or any other writer. She is her own judge and jury. The problem is that none of this is explained to the reader because there are no notes from the translators, which is a great disservice to the reader and an injustice to the author’s prose; in fact, there is little to no biographical information on Marcelle Sauvageot, which is a shame, especially when curious readers discover that her Wiki page is in French. The dearth of biographical information diminishes her accomplishments.
Marcelle Sauvageot was born in 1900 in Charleville. This is significant. Charleville borders Belgium, and readers of French poetry will instantly recognize it as the birthplace of Arthur Rimbaud, who despised it because it was provincial and parochial. He also disliked the French spoken there. Georges Simenon was another writer who took potshots at Belgian-influenced French in everything he wrote, which says a lot since he was such a prolific writer. Sauvageot, born in ‘the sticks,’ became a professor (un professeur agrégé de lettres), which is a remarkable achievement for a woman in her time. Sense of perspective: Madame Curie was the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in France in 1903. Furthermore, Sauvageot was close friends with several members of the Surrealist movement. Readers learn from the Mouton essay that André Malraux and his wife Clara got into an argument over it. Paul Claudel and Paul Valéry also appreciated it.
To have a better appreciation of Sauvageot’s rage, there should have been a note of some kind to indicate just when the pen as knife turns in the flesh. It is easy to recognize, the French text says, “pirouette.” In French, the intimate form of ‘you’ is tu. You use this form with close friends, family members, and certainly, lovers. Not Sauvageot. In the text, she says, “I have to end my sentence with a pirouette.” She then uses the formal ‘you’ or vous. Yes, she wavers back and forth at times with tu, but vous is the preferred form for her, and it is a crucial decision: it is symbolic for the distance that she has placed between herself and him. There is no footnote, no nothing in the English translation for this critical shift in tone. It would have helped the reader to know how Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis approached the text.
The sick woman has been told in writing that he will marry another, that they have their “friendship.” Cold and cowardly, no doubt, but the reader will discover that the two of them were not in an exclusive relationship. He had women friends and she had male friends; in fact, she is upset at one point with one of her male friends and turns to her boyfriend for comfort. She, in turn, knew of his future wife. Her pain is that of betrayal. He chose Her instead of her. In the text she is capitalized as d’Elle (her). It is inferred that he had chosen a younger woman, someone closer to his age. I am not splitting hairs about morality or hypocrisy. My issue is with the untranslated nuances. The translation does not inform the reader that the French text does not distinguish the nature of the relationship. Petit ami is boyfriend and petite amie is girlfriend. Diction matters to Sauvageot, for she had not written copain (buddy) or copine (female buddy). Clearly, they had friends with benefits. No matter how liberated and carefree she thought she was, his decision hurt her. I can’t help but think of Simone de Beauvoir, who was deeply hurt by Jean-Paul Sartre’s affairs.
The heart of the matter is that he chose someone else. Had they had “an agreement”? We don’t know. What we know is that she was a trophy. He was younger than she was, and his college friends approved of his ‘conquest.’ The narrator informs the reader once that she had been his “gal” – the French text says, “ma grande.” She recalls a time when she visited him at his college and his friends were behind him and she saw their approving gaze. In the Introduction, much is made of the ‘male gaze’ and, while there is merit in that feminist argument, I think that Sauvageot is far more critical of herself and romantic love. She had felt deceived, first by him and then by herself.
This is a feminist text and more. The writer calls out sexism in a curious way: men start to think of social consequences in their choice of a partner, and women see marriage as a merit badge. She finds the ‘my husband…’ phrases out of women’s mouths elitist and tiresome. I also found it strange that Sauvageot put the word “feminist” in double quotes. I’m not sure whether she identified with it or not. She does not take kindly to the notion that a woman’s happiness is dependent on a man, that women are to parrot their husband’s opinions. Women were not made for men, she tells us, although both genders are selfish in love. In a great, dismissive line, she questions the societal construct of relationship, “Is the man caressing a beautiful Siamese cat hoping to find out what the animal’s light eyes are saying?” She had hoped to find her Platonic “double,” so she could be made whole, completed. She realized that that had been a mistake, another false step in “romantic diplomacy.” She does wonder why she had accepted less.
Sauvageot’s protagonist questions love as illusion because lovers see what they want to see in the Beloved, which is why she later says that friendship (amitié) is the highest form of love. In French, there is an etymological connection that traces back to Latin between the words for friend and soul, or l’âme. The Mouton essay and the Du Bos note in the back of the book discuss the Augustinian concept of love and friendship. Authentic love, which she had thought she had for him, accepted him, warts and all. Bébé is not an attractive man. He reminds me of the pedantic dilettante Paul in the movie Midnight in Paris. Paul had insisted that Camille Claudel was Rodin’s wife to the tour guide, played by Carla Bruni, no less! Bébé is that guy. She loves him even when he is gauche. All she wanted was for him to be himself and he was: he thinks of himself as an intellectual, yet she calls him a petit commerçant. The English translation says ‘shopkeeper’ but petit (small) and commerçant is a double insult, for it is akin to calling someone lower middle-class, lest we forget that European society has class distinctions. Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet had manners, even if she didn’t have money. In the end, she would conclude that he was “mediocre.”
Commentary belongs to the genre of literature of sickness and recovery, illness and realization. As the text progresses, Sauvageot’s sick woman realizes that life is fragile and precious, that she hopes for health restored, for the cure that never comes. She had hoped that he would be there when she was well again, but he is not. I am reminded of Margaret Edson’s play Wit, except that Sauvageot finds no solace in poetry. She finds resolve and determination within to face her illness alone. That she was forsaken while ill is heartbreaking, yet no one has expressed outrage at this abandonment, though those who face serious illness often find themselves abandoned because those close to them don’t know what to say, or how to comfort them. Like the aged elephants in Babar, she went off alone to die, so as not to be a burden to the herd. Anton Chekhov, John Keats, DH Lawrence, and George Orwell all wrote with their bloodstained handkerchiefs from TB clutched in their hands, to the end. Marcelle Sauvageot, in and out of sanatoriums, would die of the “romantic disease.”
Sauvageot died the day after Du Bos returned to Paris, on 6 January 1934, as he noted, with the church bells calling “believers to salvation in honor of the Epiphany.”
Ugly Duckling Presse has offered English-speaking readers and feminist scholars a milestone text, a canonical piece of literature subject to debate and discussion, as relevant today as it was when it first appeared, almost a century ago. Commentary appeared on several Best Translated lists in 2013.
Just as the greatest works of literature offer the reader a little bit of everything from the cupboard of genres, Commentary is many things: a funeral wreath of philosophical analyses; an attempt to explain perception; the tell-all un roman à clef, except these are lettres pas envoyées, for the text’s format is that of angry journal entries meant as letters not to be sent to the offending party. Commentary even offers an element of mystery: we do not know the narrator’s name. Readers don’t know if the text is fictional or autobiographical. There are hints, but no real key; it defies definitive interpretation. All that readers know for a name is her nickname for him: ‘Baby,’ and he gets boxed into several corners of her mind. In the end, from her “small corner of conscience,” she is done with him. She has excoriated him, herself, and the inherent blind nature of love. The ‘tale’ is less than one hundred pages long, a novella, and it is a tour de force deconstruction, a meditation, on love and the differences between the genders, and how the eyes deceive the heart.
I read both the translation and the original, which I was shocked to discover is available from Amazon for free. The French text is clean, free of errors, and a true labor of love from the folks at ebooksgratuits.com. Readers who don’t know French have to understand that French is an allusive and elusive language, and literary French is not the same as spoken French. I mention this for one simple reason: Sauvageot’s written French is colloquial, spare and lean, although there are limpid, periodic graces. She is not Proust nor does she want to imitate him or any other writer. She is her own judge and jury. The problem is that none of this is explained to the reader because there are no notes from the translators, which is a great disservice to the reader and an injustice to the author’s prose; in fact, there is little to no biographical information on Marcelle Sauvageot, which is a shame, especially when curious readers discover that her Wiki page is in French. The dearth of biographical information diminishes her accomplishments.
Marcelle Sauvageot was born in 1900 in Charleville. This is significant. Charleville borders Belgium, and readers of French poetry will instantly recognize it as the birthplace of Arthur Rimbaud, who despised it because it was provincial and parochial. He also disliked the French spoken there. Georges Simenon was another writer who took potshots at Belgian-influenced French in everything he wrote, which says a lot since he was such a prolific writer. Sauvageot, born in ‘the sticks,’ became a professor (un professeur agrégé de lettres), which is a remarkable achievement for a woman in her time. Sense of perspective: Madame Curie was the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in France in 1903. Furthermore, Sauvageot was close friends with several members of the Surrealist movement. Readers learn from the Mouton essay that André Malraux and his wife Clara got into an argument over it. Paul Claudel and Paul Valéry also appreciated it.
To have a better appreciation of Sauvageot’s rage, there should have been a note of some kind to indicate just when the pen as knife turns in the flesh. It is easy to recognize, the French text says, “pirouette.” In French, the intimate form of ‘you’ is tu. You use this form with close friends, family members, and certainly, lovers. Not Sauvageot. In the text, she says, “I have to end my sentence with a pirouette.” She then uses the formal ‘you’ or vous. Yes, she wavers back and forth at times with tu, but vous is the preferred form for her, and it is a crucial decision: it is symbolic for the distance that she has placed between herself and him. There is no footnote, no nothing in the English translation for this critical shift in tone. It would have helped the reader to know how Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis approached the text.
The sick woman has been told in writing that he will marry another, that they have their “friendship.” Cold and cowardly, no doubt, but the reader will discover that the two of them were not in an exclusive relationship. He had women friends and she had male friends; in fact, she is upset at one point with one of her male friends and turns to her boyfriend for comfort. She, in turn, knew of his future wife. Her pain is that of betrayal. He chose Her instead of her. In the text she is capitalized as d’Elle (her). It is inferred that he had chosen a younger woman, someone closer to his age. I am not splitting hairs about morality or hypocrisy. My issue is with the untranslated nuances. The translation does not inform the reader that the French text does not distinguish the nature of the relationship. Petit ami is boyfriend and petite amie is girlfriend. Diction matters to Sauvageot, for she had not written copain (buddy) or copine (female buddy). Clearly, they had friends with benefits. No matter how liberated and carefree she thought she was, his decision hurt her. I can’t help but think of Simone de Beauvoir, who was deeply hurt by Jean-Paul Sartre’s affairs.
The heart of the matter is that he chose someone else. Had they had “an agreement”? We don’t know. What we know is that she was a trophy. He was younger than she was, and his college friends approved of his ‘conquest.’ The narrator informs the reader once that she had been his “gal” – the French text says, “ma grande.” She recalls a time when she visited him at his college and his friends were behind him and she saw their approving gaze. In the Introduction, much is made of the ‘male gaze’ and, while there is merit in that feminist argument, I think that Sauvageot is far more critical of herself and romantic love. She had felt deceived, first by him and then by herself.
This is a feminist text and more. The writer calls out sexism in a curious way: men start to think of social consequences in their choice of a partner, and women see marriage as a merit badge. She finds the ‘my husband…’ phrases out of women’s mouths elitist and tiresome. I also found it strange that Sauvageot put the word “feminist” in double quotes. I’m not sure whether she identified with it or not. She does not take kindly to the notion that a woman’s happiness is dependent on a man, that women are to parrot their husband’s opinions. Women were not made for men, she tells us, although both genders are selfish in love. In a great, dismissive line, she questions the societal construct of relationship, “Is the man caressing a beautiful Siamese cat hoping to find out what the animal’s light eyes are saying?” She had hoped to find her Platonic “double,” so she could be made whole, completed. She realized that that had been a mistake, another false step in “romantic diplomacy.” She does wonder why she had accepted less.
Sauvageot’s protagonist questions love as illusion because lovers see what they want to see in the Beloved, which is why she later says that friendship (amitié) is the highest form of love. In French, there is an etymological connection that traces back to Latin between the words for friend and soul, or l’âme. The Mouton essay and the Du Bos note in the back of the book discuss the Augustinian concept of love and friendship. Authentic love, which she had thought she had for him, accepted him, warts and all. Bébé is not an attractive man. He reminds me of the pedantic dilettante Paul in the movie Midnight in Paris. Paul had insisted that Camille Claudel was Rodin’s wife to the tour guide, played by Carla Bruni, no less! Bébé is that guy. She loves him even when he is gauche. All she wanted was for him to be himself and he was: he thinks of himself as an intellectual, yet she calls him a petit commerçant. The English translation says ‘shopkeeper’ but petit (small) and commerçant is a double insult, for it is akin to calling someone lower middle-class, lest we forget that European society has class distinctions. Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet had manners, even if she didn’t have money. In the end, she would conclude that he was “mediocre.”
Commentary belongs to the genre of literature of sickness and recovery, illness and realization. As the text progresses, Sauvageot’s sick woman realizes that life is fragile and precious, that she hopes for health restored, for the cure that never comes. She had hoped that he would be there when she was well again, but he is not. I am reminded of Margaret Edson’s play Wit, except that Sauvageot finds no solace in poetry. She finds resolve and determination within to face her illness alone. That she was forsaken while ill is heartbreaking, yet no one has expressed outrage at this abandonment, though those who face serious illness often find themselves abandoned because those close to them don’t know what to say, or how to comfort them. Like the aged elephants in Babar, she went off alone to die, so as not to be a burden to the herd. Anton Chekhov, John Keats, DH Lawrence, and George Orwell all wrote with their bloodstained handkerchiefs from TB clutched in their hands, to the end. Marcelle Sauvageot, in and out of sanatoriums, would die of the “romantic disease.”
Sauvageot died the day after Du Bos returned to Paris, on 6 January 1934, as he noted, with the church bells calling “believers to salvation in honor of the Epiphany.”
Ugly Duckling Presse has offered English-speaking readers and feminist scholars a milestone text, a canonical piece of literature subject to debate and discussion, as relevant today as it was when it first appeared, almost a century ago. Commentary appeared on several Best Translated lists in 2013.
May 21, 2023
An essay, a diary, a letter, (a tale). Something else, an analytically impassioned dissection of relationship structures that despite a personal specificity that we could never have full access to, strikes at universals (and across a century, (too) much holds), or blurs its particulars through clear-eyed poetics that spring both feeling and thought from the page. Was anyone else writing like this in 1933? It feels singular, an anomaly escaping its moment, perhaps only able to come into existence from a place already terminally outside. Sauvageot was already in a sanatarium with tuberculosis when she wrote this, a year later she'd be dead, yet it burns with life.
May 25, 2016
Verbazingwekkende 'ovni' van de Franse letteren, een heuse 'perlouse' uit 1933, het enige gepubliceerde werk van de nobele onbekende Sauvageot. In het sanatorium waar ze wordt behandeld, krijgt een jonge vrouw een brief van haar geliefde die aankondigt dat hij trouwt met een ander. Haar antwoord is de verbijsterende autopsie van een breuk, het onderkoelde relaas van een onthechting, een geniale 'commentaar' op de trouweloze die zijn geliefde verlaat. Elegant, beheerst, bezield, zeldzaam als een zwarte parel.
August 4, 2014
"Out of a certain lover's puerility, I had promised you that I would always retain a small particle of true love for you, even if I loved passionately elsewhere... [W]ithin me is your image, taking up all the room; for me not to suffer anymore, you have to leave, so that one day, when it is uttered in front of me, your name will blow by me without touching a thing. I need this erasure..."
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July 19, 2020Precies wat de titel al zegt: Dit boek is een commentaar. Een commentaar aan een geliefde die zijn eerdere en zieke geliefde aan de kant zet voor een andere geliefde en dit per brief aan de zieke geliefde meedeelt en hoopt dat ze nog vrienden zullen blijven.
Commentaar is dan ook het commentaar van de zieke geliefde op de haar in de steek latende geliefde. Het is een uitvoerig commentaar hoewel eigenlijk kort, waarin ze sterk voor zichzelf en voor haar rol als vrouw in de relatie lijkt op te komen. Dit doet ze in brieven of een soort dagboekfragmenten die op brieven lijken, zonder ze echt te versturen. Haar woorden dringt het onrecht en tevens het recht naar boven, dat ze zichzelf wil, en mag, gunnen.
Ik las de woorden als zijnde een grote kracht voor iemand die verdriet heeft. Door te schrijven verdriet wegschrijven, je hoopt dat dat het is voor de gekwetste geliefde, en zo lijkt het ook te zijn. Toch voelt het ook ergens wat utopisch aan, dat dat echt helemaal werkt; en misschien maakt dat Commentaar ook wel nog menselijker, pijn is er geweest en een beetje zal wellicht nog langer blijven. De schrijfster stelt zich kwetsbaar en sterk op en houdt de eer aan zichzelf. En dat is te waarderen. Tegelijkertijd zegt een weggestopte stem in mij dat ook de kwetsende geliefde zo ook zijn menselijkheid heeft die hier wordt weggezet, niet alleen als zijn eigen stem, maar als de stem van de man. En ik denk dat dat eigenlijk heel belangrijk is, dat die hier naar achteren wordt geduwd, weg eigenlijk, om zo ruimte te geven aan rollen die hopelijk gelijkgetrokken kunnen worden, al dan niet nu, misschien ooit. En misschien is dat eigenlijk wel de grootste pijn die hier de aandracht krijgt - de ongelijkheid.
Soms misschien iets te bloemerig geschreven (al weet ik niet helemaal wat ik daarmee bedoel) voor mijn smaak, maar ook dat mag er zijn. Volgende fragment is er slechts een van velen waarop op welbespraakte doch harde toon een bijna voelbare (vriendelijke?) klap wordt uitgedeeld:
Commentaar is dan ook het commentaar van de zieke geliefde op de haar in de steek latende geliefde. Het is een uitvoerig commentaar hoewel eigenlijk kort, waarin ze sterk voor zichzelf en voor haar rol als vrouw in de relatie lijkt op te komen. Dit doet ze in brieven of een soort dagboekfragmenten die op brieven lijken, zonder ze echt te versturen. Haar woorden dringt het onrecht en tevens het recht naar boven, dat ze zichzelf wil, en mag, gunnen.
Ik las de woorden als zijnde een grote kracht voor iemand die verdriet heeft. Door te schrijven verdriet wegschrijven, je hoopt dat dat het is voor de gekwetste geliefde, en zo lijkt het ook te zijn. Toch voelt het ook ergens wat utopisch aan, dat dat echt helemaal werkt; en misschien maakt dat Commentaar ook wel nog menselijker, pijn is er geweest en een beetje zal wellicht nog langer blijven. De schrijfster stelt zich kwetsbaar en sterk op en houdt de eer aan zichzelf. En dat is te waarderen. Tegelijkertijd zegt een weggestopte stem in mij dat ook de kwetsende geliefde zo ook zijn menselijkheid heeft die hier wordt weggezet, niet alleen als zijn eigen stem, maar als de stem van de man. En ik denk dat dat eigenlijk heel belangrijk is, dat die hier naar achteren wordt geduwd, weg eigenlijk, om zo ruimte te geven aan rollen die hopelijk gelijkgetrokken kunnen worden, al dan niet nu, misschien ooit. En misschien is dat eigenlijk wel de grootste pijn die hier de aandracht krijgt - de ongelijkheid.
Soms misschien iets te bloemerig geschreven (al weet ik niet helemaal wat ik daarmee bedoel) voor mijn smaak, maar ook dat mag er zijn. Volgende fragment is er slechts een van velen waarop op welbespraakte doch harde toon een bijna voelbare (vriendelijke?) klap wordt uitgedeeld:
Als u zin hebt om een hele dag kringetjes in het water te spugen, zal de vrouw die van u houdt een hele dag zwijgend blijven toekijken hoe u kringetjes in het water maakt: ze zal gelukkig zijn omdat u plezier hebt in wat u doet. En als u elke dag zin hebt om kringetjes in het water te maken, zal die vrouw elke dag naar u blijven kijken. U voegde eraan toe dat ik dat niet zou kunnen. Dat moet ik inderdaad toegeven. Ik zou eerst proberen te slapen of zelf iets te doen; en als dat niet ging, zou ik niet kunnen nalaten te zeggen dat u stom was en dat u me beter kon zoenen. Daarna zou ik naast u gaan staan en zelf ook kringetjes in het water gaan maken, om te doen wat u deed, en ik zou het spelletje van de grootste of de kleinste kringetjes bedenken. Zeg eens eerlijk, had u naast mij kunnen staan toekijken hoe ik kringetjes in het water maakte? p.32
March 29, 2023
I quite liked this. In this memoir the author has TB and has to go to a sanatorium in which she receives a letter from her lover in which he informs her that he is going to marry someone else, but they are still to remain “friends”. The rest of this is the authors, well, “ commentary” on her relationship with him and hetero relationships in general. Leans feminist for the time.
I always wonder what I would ever have in common with previous generations but as usual, humans are sometimes little cookie cutters in how we think and feel and worry and love. I found much of it relatable.
I always wonder what I would ever have in common with previous generations but as usual, humans are sometimes little cookie cutters in how we think and feel and worry and love. I found much of it relatable.
July 20, 2018
I was capsized in this text
August 15, 2015
i guess i should trust book reviews less. Just a boring long rant of love cliches.
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October 22, 2024Ik probeerde buiten u een klein houvast te bewaren, om me aan beet te grijpen op de dag dat u niet meer van me zou houden. Dat kleine houvast was niet iemand anders, het was geen droom, ook geen beeld. Het was wat u mijn egoïsme en mijn trots noemde; ikzelf was het waarop ik in mijn leed wilde kunnen terugvallen Ik wilde me aan mezelf kunnen vastklampen, helemaal alleen met mijn pijn, mijn twijfels, mijn gebrek aan vertrouwen. In tijden van ontreddering geeft het feit dat ik mezelf kan voelen me de kracht om door te gaan. Als alles verandert, als alles pijn doet, ben ik mezelf bij mijzelf. Ik had alleen ten onder kunnen gaan als ik er zeker van was geweest dat ik mezelf niet meer nodig zou hebben.
February 11, 2024
A mini masterpiece of the heart. Can't recommend enough.
Commentary is a buried ~90 year old feminist gem. It's a universal account of a love that has died and been betrayed written with such honesty and emotional intelligence. This is the kind of ageless book that would still be true if it was read in a 1000 years time. Please, someone, recommend me more books like this. It's all I want to read.
4-4.5
Commentary is a buried ~90 year old feminist gem. It's a universal account of a love that has died and been betrayed written with such honesty and emotional intelligence. This is the kind of ageless book that would still be true if it was read in a 1000 years time. Please, someone, recommend me more books like this. It's all I want to read.
4-4.5
October 22, 2023
A short but incredibly effective story that so accurately captures the emotional response and thought process when dealing with, and potentially losing love.
If you have ever written in a journal while experiencing heartbreak, the tone will be very familiar, and in my opinion, somewhat comforting.
If you have ever written in a journal while experiencing heartbreak, the tone will be very familiar, and in my opinion, somewhat comforting.
August 7, 2023
Arguably the hardest break-up message ever written
October 1, 2024
Everyone should read this book once in their life
August 1, 2016
In my review of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlisted “The Mussel Feast”, back in early April, why did it take twenty-three years for a work being celebrated in its native language before the English speaking and reading world discovers it? Well if that sounds outrageous, this work, was originally published back in 1933 and has undergone NINE republications in France. English readers get to see it for the first time in 2014!! Add to that the fact that this edition from Ugly Duckling Presse had a print run of 1,250, therefore the exposure is not that high. I’m sure they are eternally grateful for the Best Translated Book Award Longlist nomination, a few more copies moved!!
Our writer, Marcelle Sauvageot died from tuberculosis aged in her early thirties. This “tale” is a monologue, taking in her journey to a sanatorium to recover from her illness:
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/
Our writer, Marcelle Sauvageot died from tuberculosis aged in her early thirties. This “tale” is a monologue, taking in her journey to a sanatorium to recover from her illness:
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/
June 29, 2016
Commentary may feel somewhat familiar to contemporary readers, but I want to make the case it is only a feeling of familiarity. What we have here is unique. The text is structured as a series of reflective, perhaps furious, letters (which the authors has no intention of sending) to her former lover. In these letters/reflections, she explores her dismay, with hints of bitterness subsumed by sadness.
For more of my thoughts, see my post on my blog, The Mookse and the Gripes.
For more of my thoughts, see my post on my blog, The Mookse and the Gripes.
January 8, 2015
Sauvageot wrote Commentary in a sanitarium not long before her death from tuberculosis, and it lies somewhere between fiction and memoir, reading like a journal or a collection of letters-not-sent to a lover who has announced from afar that he will marry another woman. She expresses her anger and disappointment while analyzing the societal forces playing outside of the relationship itself. It’s amazingly feminist for its time, intimate in its sadness and defiantly hopeful. Read more on the booklog
March 8, 2016
Just re-read this, still amazing.
Her emotional insight and startling honesty combine for a powerful tonic to the all too often wanton and certain language with which people talk about love as if they know what we talk about when talk about love.
It is painful to watch her lash out against herself and Him, but also fiercely moving and enlivening.
We all know what it is to be driven mad by our passion for another, but Sauvageot finds a way to give this common madness a true voice
Her emotional insight and startling honesty combine for a powerful tonic to the all too often wanton and certain language with which people talk about love as if they know what we talk about when talk about love.
It is painful to watch her lash out against herself and Him, but also fiercely moving and enlivening.
We all know what it is to be driven mad by our passion for another, but Sauvageot finds a way to give this common madness a true voice
December 30, 2014
I found this on a friend's bookshelf, stole it, and read in one sitting. It's the perfect book to read if you are a smart woman who has lost love or a sense of self (or is struggling to integrate the two); it is an achievement of anger, grief and intellectual inquiry, and an intimate encounter with the clarity of illness. Why have I not heard of Marcelle Sauvageot before? Thank you, Ugly Duckling Press (translated beautifully by Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis).
March 15, 2015
This small book articulates the logic behind the pain of separation and abandonment better than anything I've ever read. Sauvageot deftly disarms the sentimental dishonesty we normally use to discuss love and relationships, and demands a radical new form of accountability to ourselves and each other. The book holds up fabulously to second readings, too!
March 19, 2014
Longlisted for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. (And I suspect it will end up as a finalist as well . . . )
June 13, 2014
A beautifully produced, fascinating document.
September 10, 2015
Nostálgica.
El libro más nostálgico.
El libro más nostálgico.
December 24, 2016
Rating: 4.5* of five
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