The Lady & the Little Fox Fur

by Violette Leduc

'Violette Leduc's novels are works of genius and also a bit peculiar' Deborah Levy, from the introduction

An old woman lives alone in a tiny attic flat in Paris, counting out coffee beans every morning beneath the roar of the overhead metro. Starving, she spends her days walking around the city, each step a bid for recognition of her own existence. She rides crowded metro carriages to feel the warmth of other people, and watches the hot batter of pancakes drip from the hands of street-sellers.

One morning she awakes with an urgent need to taste an orange; but when she rummages around in the bins she finds instead a discarded fox fur scarf. The little fox fur becomes the key to her salvation, the friend who changes her lonely existence into a playful world of her own invention.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is a stunning portrait of Paris, of the invisibility we all feel in a big city, and ultimately of the hope and triumph of a woman who reclaims her place in the world.

'[Leduc] can capture the smells of a country childhood, dazzle with the lights of the Place de la Concorde or make you feel the silky slither of her eel-grey suit' Observer

'This book is as richly humane as anything else you're likely to read' Independent

'A forceful affirmation of the human spirit' Guardian

Genres: Fiction, France, Classics, French Literature, 20th Century, Feminism, Literary Fiction

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Violette Leduc was born in Arras, Pas de Calais, France, the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl, Berthe. In Valenciennes, the young Violette spent most of her childhood suffering from an ugly self-image and from her mother's hostility and overprotectiveness.

Her formal education, begun in 1913, was interrupted by World War I. After the war, she went to a boarding school, the Collège de Douai, where she experienced lesbian affairs with a classmate and a music instructor who was fired over the incident.

In 1926, Leduc moved to Paris and enrolled in the Lycée Racine. That same year, she failed her baccalaureate exam and began working as a telephone operator and secretary at Plon publishers.

In 1932 she met Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir, who encouraged her to write. Her first novel L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin) was published by Albert Camus for Éditions Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.

Leduc's best-known book, the memoir La Bâtarde, was published in 1964. It nearly won the Prix Goncourt and quickly became a bestseller. She went on to write eight more books, including La Folie en tête (Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little gem of a book, that was read in one go, but every now and then I paused for a moment to let certain sentences really sink in, almost like the same effect poetry has. It's a short read yes, but it's a book not to rush through, and I certainly benefited from that. There is a 60-year-old lady protagonist at its core, but the streets of Paris are just as much at the novella's centre. Hunger and loneliness are two things that dominate, as the poor protagonist, who lives in a little room, has certain rituals set out, like taking a ride on the metro with any money she happens to have, to be close to other lost souls, and going through the bins in search of any food, with the smallest things she happens to come across meaning a great deal to her, like an orange for example, and the abandoned little fox fur, which she treats like gold dust, it becomes her precious treasure. The narrative is told from a third person perspective, which is embedded with an internal stream of consciousness. The lady surprisingly does not pity herself, instead she opts for a sort of survivor's triumphalism, like each passing day drives her on stronger. But she is also living in a blurred reality, as she suffers with hallucinatory starvation, and is haunted by childhood memories, so the tone of the book is sad but also strangely uplifting and heart-warming. There is also an existential feel to it, and a euphoria for simply existing, somewhat resembling a character Beckett could have created. The Lady and the Little Fox Fur was an elegant and bittersweet novella, which captures an existence where life is reduced to the bare essentials, and that much of what came before was simply excess baggage. The lady survives with next to nothing, almost on the verge of death by starvation, and that state of mind is carried through with an impressionistic, near hallucinatory prose. It's sometimes unclear as to what is real, and whether things actually happened or not. It’s an unusual blend of stark realism and hazy thought, that worked really well. And it had that lingering effect long after I finished it, that is always a good sign of an impressive book.

[Dannii Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Often, we melt into our ecstasies as though they were jams, as though we were sinking into syrupy bowls of gooseberries, of raspberries, of bilberries. She let herself melt into her furniture and her things. Why expend her love elsewhere when they loved her all the time, when they were waiting for her? The world is a heavy burden, and yet we carry it. As soon as we are back in our burrows, whether joyful or discontented, we close the door upon it, we turn our backs upon it. The fidelity of our things is only an expression of our own infidelity.”

I knew I was going to adore this one, from reading the introduction penned by my literary love, Deborah Levy. There are many similarities between these two writers, despite the decades that separate them.

There is little narrative to this book, beyond what the synopsis details: a sixty-year-old, poverty-stricken women chronicles her days of loneliness and hunger in the city of Paris. She assigns character and voice to the possession around her, leading the city to utter its woes and its triumphs aloud for her alone to appreciate and surrender herself to.

This peculiar narrative style enraptured and enchanted me. The words seemed to buzz with an energy that betrayed more about the protagonist than mere description ever could and enlivened the Parisian setting, until it felt lifted off the page.

Bright and lively, in character and setting, I could not fail to fall in love. Sentiments, such as the one below, had me reading and rereading in awe of such perfectly placed and well-constructed phrases:

“The policeman was inviting the pedestrians over to the other pavement. She accepted, she plunged forward into Paris, and as she made her way over the crossing, she proclaimed her corner of the city was a forest.”

Others, had me heart-sick with the poignancy of the story that is slwoyl uncovered. The protagonist’s thoughts betray her stifling loneliness and the pangs of hunger ring as hollow inside of her as her figure itself does, as she traverses the well-worn streets of Paris:

“She smiled a martyr's smile for her own benefit: for her wretchedness was also a tenderness, and resignation is not the same as oblivion.”

During this entire review I have let Leduc speak for herself. I am in awe of her prowess and have spent an entire day lost to the wonders and the worries she portrays. This book is a wilting lament that struck me physically. This is experimental art, performed in the written medium, and I am Ludac’s captive audience.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am on the side of light hearts and light wallets; look over here, you too can be made of light. I never gave anything away, I deserve to be where I am.

Eleanor Rigby versus the Piano Man. The old man in Home Alone versus the bird lady in Home Alone 2. There is sentiment without being sentimental. To look at someone else in their place, feel the shadows where there will be a widening crack to swallow them in the pieces they left behind as they left behind parts of their soul everywhere you could fear what could happen. You are them too without having to stop and say "That could be me" to feel something.
I hate the manipulative Home Alone 2 stuff (I've probably used this comparison before. The Home Alone flicks are my barometer of choice empathy versus manipulation). The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is the first kind. She feels the world turn their backs and she relives the drafts ritualistically. The truth isn't some "This could be me". You live in the world. It is closer to say you never gave anything away. You are you and you are them. The worst that could happen.

She is in mourning for all her things in pawnshops.

There was a part near the end I felt the chunks of dismay rising in my throat. Oh no, she's going to explain what didn't need to be explained. She rescued the little fox fur in the street. He has to be rescued for her from the hand of shop keepers. The bitchy shop girls in Pretty Woman will come after you. Hold him under your coat, wrap him up tight and secure until it is safe at night. At night it is safe to look at what you love in tenderness. The light of day is rough, turning your hands into the helpless roughness of Lennie from Of Mice and Men. Don't kill what you love.

She said it aloud that she was in mourning for all her things in pawnshops. A voice that hurts from its disuse. If I speak at all in real life my throat hurts as if I had been talking for hours. I have this feeling that her throat probably hurt in making this announcement. She must have hurt with her whole body in being seen by the cold bakery shopkeeper. This place between taking a stand and getting the worst that could happen over with. To be invisible.

She wants to give away her only treasure, that little fox fur. I didn't need to be told why she did it. I must have felt the gratitude toward the seller who rejected her as she did because I already knew it. But it wasn't a misstep as I feared. The sixty year old woman lives her life over again. The days when she had sardines or a fried egg for lunch. Now she goes hungry, holding the decision to spend money on pancakes or a metro ticket (never to take a ride. The warmth of rushing invisible strangers). At sixteen she was eccentric. At seventeen, at another age. The same life leading up to sinking and falling. The world the world never notices. She stops to think about what could have happened. She savors the worst that could have happened. To lose her fox fur. This is how she lives. I think she really lived inbetween, when she has something to spend. After the metro she retreats back to her room with no money. When she buys rolls from money given to her in the street it is with the remaining three coins she goes home with. I think the future of the money meant more to her and it is the reassurance of safety that feeds her. She still has him. To lose him and still have him made him more precious. I didn't need to be explained to but she needs to explain to herself. It means more if she explains it to herself. It is a way of being seen to explain it to yourself.

My copy is the pink edition put out by Peter Owen Modern Classics. A little girl is putting on the I'm showing off for the adults smile and pose in her dress up clothes. This could sorta work, I guess. It does remind me of six year old me who was painfully attached to my faux fur rabbit coat. I wore it every day. It was matted and ugly and I loved it. One day in class another boy told the teacher that it was too hot in class. I chimed in a "Me too!" that I relived in humiliation for a very long time after. I would remember in deliberation the teacher snapping that it was because I always wore that stupid fur coat as my reason to never speak up out loud. This little girl connection to the woman who holds on is fitting to the book. If anything I think I would love the book more, embrace it more, if it felt freer from this deliberate mental life. It is chains. It is very real and Leduc makes it alive. I just know it too well. When she loves the unalive, searches for the cracks, I love the half world that she makes for herself. It doesn't come alive because she is turning her back. It is all that she has. It isn't a real world of her own if she is not in it. The thinking feels too a writer is thinking about the steps to make up a character. It all fits and I can't argue it but the thinking is when you look at someone else on the street and they are separate. Some time you have to stop thinking and just feel. Does it make sense to say that sometimes this book did that and sometimes it didn't? I love it but I don't love it as if it were real. It's a dream, it's a little fox fur. You hope you can keep on believing in it in the night. If LeDuc did that two worlds in one on purpose she's probably a genius. Anyway, that's what this book is like. Sometimes you are reading a book and sometimes you just want to be there with her and see her. She'd know you saw her and she wouldn't have to be on the floor in that bakery.

But I just don't like the smile on her face, this girl on the cover. She doesn't feel that way about her little fox fur. He is a friend. He isn't an armor in that sense. If you were ever attached to a stuffed animal. The eyes that seemed real. They seemed to love you. She feels this way about every inch of the once living fox's body. If she would have worn him in another way it was too long ago. She can't go back to that time. The worst has happened and tomorrow is too far away. I don't feel sad about losing this little girl's smile because nothing has happened. I love the woman who misses her things in pawn shops. She is the little girl and the old woman and everything has happened and still could. I could stare at that forever and imagine things in eyes. Maybe there's not a good enough reason like The Piano Man being a shitty song to not find the cheesy little girl smile boring but that's how I feel.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have wanted to read Violette Leduc's novella, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, for such a long time, but was never able to find a copy for an affordable price.  Thank goodness for Penguin, who have recently published it in a gorgeous edition as part of their European Writers series.  Translated from the French by Derek Coltman, and first published in 1965, the Penguin publication includes an introduction written by Deborah Levy.  

The Guardian writes that the novella gives 'a forceful affirmation of the human spirit', and The Observer that Leduc 'can capture the smells of a country childhood, dazzle with the lights of the Place de la Concorde or make you feel the silky slither of her eel-grey suit.'  Among Leduc's first admirers were Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, who were beguiled by her writing.

The lady of the novella's title is a sixty-year-old woman who lives in Paris, in a tiny attic apartment.  She has no money, is slowly starving, and 'spends her days walking around the city, each step a bid for recognition of her own existence.'  She has placed herself into a routine of comparative comfort, riding the subway and walking in large crowds just to be close to others.  Once we have become accustomed to her ways, the crux of the novella comes when she gifts herself an unrelenting purpose during a stifling hot summer's day:  'One morning she awakes with an urgent need to taste an orange; but when she rummages in the bins she finds instead a discarded fox fur scarf.'  This scarf 'becomes the key to her salvation, the friend who changes her lonely existence into a playful world of her own invention.'

In her introduction, Levy notes her own experiences with the novella.  She writes that 'Leduc can make this reader laugh out loud at her grand themes: loneliness, humiliation, hunger, defeat, disappointment - all of which are great comic subjects in the right hands...  It requires a sensibility that is totally unsentimental, a way of staring at life and making from it a kind of tough poetry...'.  She goes on to write: 'It is because Leduc profoundly understands how mysterious human beings are that her attention as a writer is always in an interesting place.'  Of her prose, she states: 'Life, like language, is coherent and incoherent, and Leduc knows the only way to do justice to this dynamic is to fold into the texture of her narrative the strange in-between bits of experience...  Writing, for Leduc, is a concentrated form of experiencing.'

The novella opens at the end of winter.  Leduc writes: 'February was a sullen captive in the afternoon mist, and the grey streets were melting indistinguishably into the grey street corners.  She wandered around the still empty, still silent Paris-Sevran bus.  On tiptoe, avidly, she gazed through the windows at the backs of the seats, at the luggage rack, and thought of the passengers who were not there, whom she had ever known.'  Our protagonist is beset by a variety of problems which become apparent from the outset of the story, and often philosophises about her life and the turns which it has taken: 'She began putting problems to herself.  Not to leave her own neighbourhood, not to travel was a tragedy.  But to leave all that she cherished would be another tragedy.'  Her quite miserable present is interspersed with memories from her past: 'Memories are comfy too, they are swaddling bands, they wrap you up warm like a mummy.  What moment is there in life that is not already a memory?'

Leduc's prose, and its construction, is fascinating. The narrative is meandering, taking swift turns here and there.  There sometimes seems to be very little to connect one sentence to the next, but Leduc skilfully builds a surprisingly cohesive picture of her Paris.  There is a beguiling feel to the sentences which she weaves, and the descriptions which she gives reveal the grittier side of the city.  Paris is a character in parallel; it alters alongside our protagonist, and faces a variety of shifting moods, just as she does: 'Paris had not forgotten her, Paris was lighting up on every side, the night was tender, the light was soft, the neon signs were flickering on, the sky was candid, and she was rewarded for loving Paris so much.'  I found the protagonist's relationship with inanimate objects - her keys, coins, and handbag - very interesting, and it is an element which I rarely come across in fiction.

In The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, Leduc reveals just how lonely it can be to live in the midst of a big city, and how one can retain their own place in the world.  She writes of coming to terms with the ageing process; her unnamed narrator's 'hands shook these days when she was threading a needle; her fingers were growing old; life and death were two maniacs locked in a well-matched struggle.'  Our protagonist is peculiar, and has such a lot of depth and complexity to her.  

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur spans just eighty pages, but there is so much involved within it that it feels like a much longer work. Reading it is something like being stuck in a maze; one has to unravel so many crossed threads, and travel down so many dead ends, to reach the protagonist in the middle.  The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is one of the most peculiar books that I have ever read, but I feel that it will also prove itself to be one of the most memorable. 

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leduc's prose reads like a combination of the surrealism of Breton and the incandescent poetry of Genet; the novel follows the adventures of an eccentric and forlorn woman, as she reminisces wistfully on her past and ruminates wearily on her present. Leduc is able to render the latter via stream of gentle, dreamlike prose, as Paris is transformed into a cacophony of sounds and colours, 

"Suddenly she was discovering again, as she always did, the movement, the fragility, the gentle palpitation of lights reflected in the waters of the Seine. It was the river reflecting light, but it was also a breast heaving with emotion."

In the absence of human contact, the woman interacts with objects around her-a man emerges from a tree which turns out to be a phone back, the utensils around her house are constantly communicating with her, not with words, but in their interactions with the light which surrounds them and finally the discarded fox fur which she finds and which offers her consolation in the overwhelming sense of loneliness which overcomes her. 

[Burak Kuscu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yine Türk okur tarafından hakkı tam verilmemiş eserlerden biriyle karşı karşıyayız. Kısa ama bir o kadar da başarılı bir eserdi. Yazar, kahramanımızın içinde bulunduğu zorluk, yoksulluk ve delilik halini, okurun içini sıkan bir netlikle ve rahatsızlık verene cümleleriyle aktarıyor. Yaşlılık da yine işlenen temalardan bir diğeri. Bana Knut Hamsun - Açlık'ı da anımsattı.

Başarılı bir psikolojik novella olduğunu düşünüyorum.

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foreword

--The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

[Mary Durrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extraordinary book.
Once I became accustomed to the prose style I enjoyed the book.
A down and out 60 year old lady living in Paris.
You can just imagine a character like this.
Living by oneself and talking to the furniture.
Wandering around the city.
Wonderful descriptions of Paris and the twinkling lights on the Seine.
Violette certainly packs a punch and makes one think.
You will never look at the elderly in the same way again.
Recommended for something completely different!

[Jennie Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone read Leduc right now.

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Violette Leduc’s fiction usually has an autobiographical element; for most of her adult life impoverished and living in squalid rooms, even when championed by writers like Cocteau, Genet and de Beauvoir she felt like an outsider,

“I don’t think of myself as not understood, I think of myself as non-existent.”

Leduc’s novella reads like a version of her experiences, as it follows a nameless, heroine on daily walks through Paris. She’s an incredibly isolated, aging woman, near destitute, worn down by constant hunger; yet she rises every day, counts her coffee beans then leaves her shabby rented room to roam the streets, caught up in a cycle of repetition that structures an otherwise formless existence. Armed with an intimate knowledge of the city’s routines and rhythms, she passes through crowds, under no illusion about how others see her,

”She bumped into women hurriedly buying food for their dinners; she was breathing the oxygen meant for people who had spent their day working. To cry out that it was impossible for her to begin her life all over again would be useless. The young girl in the cleaner’s did not raise her head; she was shutting away the corpses in the machines, transforming the floppy cadavers with her steam iron. Grandpapa, grandmama, aunts and cousins had given her their blouses and shirts…She went over to the open square of window, and there, as the steam from the cleaner’s billowed out around her, she lamented softly for her solitary, female state, while her stomach cried out in hunger.”

But in spite of the woman’s desperate attempts to stay afloat, her body and mind are rapidly disintegrating, she’s not far from sinking, unless something changes and soon…

In her brief introduction Deborah Levy compares Leduc to Woolf and Beckett, characterising Leduc’s fiction as both ‘genius’ and ‘peculiar,’ an apt description for this, although I found her approach more measured than in La Batarde - which was fascinating but frequently overwritten, painfully cloying, and infuriating. Although the same criticisms could apply to aspects of The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, it’s also an impressive, moving depiction of loneliness, poverty and female invisibility, Leduc’s prose’s shot through with moments of intense lyricism, while some passages have an elliptical, hallucinatory quality reminiscent of Anna Kavan.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

I freely admit that my ratings are always a (highly subjective) amalgam of (1) my perception of the book’s literary merit, combined with (2) how much I enjoyed reading it. The books from the Penguin European Writers series have been challenging for me to rate because although I have admired their experimentalism and art, I have not found them to be particularly enjoyable to read. This has so far been my favourite of the three - the other two being Death in Spring and The Beautiful Summer - and I think it’s because it delves so completely into the interior world of one character. I’m quite partial to books which give the reader a sense of how another person perceives and experiences the world. It’s one of the reasons, maybe one of the most important reasons, why fiction is so important to me.

Not that this interior world is a comfortable place to dwell. In her perceptive introduction, the writer Deborah Levy tells us that Leduc “can make this reader laugh out loud at her grand themes: loneliness, humiliation, hunger, defeat, disappointment - all of which are great comic subjects in the right hands.” So that’s what you will find in the this novel: loneliness, humiliation, hunger, defeat and disappointment. It’s an incredibly compressed storyline with the most airy and fanciful sentences. The protagonist is an ‘elderly’ woman of 60; this is not a well-nourished and well-oiled 60, but rather a frail, brittle 60 which is about as sturdy as a dandelion. At several points in the narrative, the main character worries that if she gets any lighter she will float away, or cease to exist. The woman is starving, literally starving; and the reader is not spared any detail of her meagre diet and her pitiful attempts to eke out her physical existence. But this sense of being weightless has also to do with the fear of becoming, quite literally, invisible. The loneliness which permeates every sentence of this book is heart-wrenching; and yet it is handled so - again, this word - lightly. Leduc’s old woman has lost her mind, and seems somehow better for it. She lives in a world of fantasy, making the most of chance encounters and her association with objects. She spends her last francs to ride the Metro, just so she can feel close to the bustle of human life - just so she can observe and bear witness.

One of the weirdest aspects of the book is the sexual undercurrent which runs through the old woman’s physical loneliness. She longs for human touch and connection, but in this most intimate sense. The plot (what there is of it) turns on her desperate decision to sell what she ‘understands’ to be her last asset: a fox fur. (In reality, this fox fur is a nasty bedraggled thing that she found in the garbage one summer when she was looking for an orange.) Her attachment to the little fox fur is creepy, funny, pathetic and strangely moving. But just when the story threatens to fragment into absurdity, its narrator ‘gets’ the joke of it all.

Truly unique and oddly affecting.

Thanks very much to Penguin/Random House UK for sending me a free copy of this book.

[küb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Violette Leduc'ün 1965 yılında yayınlanan ve bizim yazarla tanışma kitabımız olan Küçük Tilkili Kadın.
Paris’te yoksulluğun bile son deminde artık yemek ve sahip oldukları üzerinden deliliğin eşiğine gelmiş kadın karakterimizin şehrin, ışığın, gürültünün eziciliği altında yalnızlığına gömülürken çöpte bulduğu tilki kürküyle kurduğu teselli birlikteliğine sarılması.
Oldukça düz, tartışmasız, olaysız bir akışı var.
Violette Leduc'ün diğer eserlerini okumak isteyecek kadar başarılı bir novella.

“Artık ölebilir: Sonbaharda kayısı ağaçlarının tadını çıkartmıştı çünkü. O ağaçları görmek, bütün hayatını tek bir saniyede hayal etmek demek. Onları hala görebiliyor, pembe veya turuncu. Bir renk, hafif bir kürk. Onun kayısı ağaçları, nöbetleşe sürdürdüğü sonsuz hayranlığı, hayranlık nöbeti devreden de devralan da kendisi. Onları severken aslında bir erkepi, bir çocuğu seviyor. Güneş gizleniyor, her şey ne kadar da narin. Biraz karabiber, biraz tuz, üç-dört çatı, vadideki küçük bir köy, yağmurdan önceki aydınlık şeridi ve işte yığınla geleceği karşılamaya gidiyor.“

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book a lot. It was exactly what I like: an infinitely interesting character who stirred so many different emotions in me. I loved her, sometimes I was angry with her and sometimes giggled at her.

The main character is an old poor lady, who lives alone in Paris in some dilapidated old room. She is lonely and constantly hungry. Now it would sound like something sad at first sight, but it is actually not. The best word to describe it is "bitter-sweet". The old lady is not a victim, she is so full of love, imagination, and playfulness that even though I did feel sorry for her, I never actually felt sad or hopeless throughout the book. She actually reminded me of Anne of Green Gables in a sense that she had such a lively vivid imagination. She basically lives in a world of her own creation where she is not a poor old hubby but a young flirtatious beautiful girl. I loved her.

I would highly recommend this novel to everyone who likes quiet books about unique and interesting people.

[Quill&Queer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a haunting meditation on loneliness and poverty, set in Paris likely some time in the mid 20th century. The voice of it's older protagonist drew me in, and I felt for her even during the moments when her hunger would cause the narrative to twist into a distorted, dream like state. I was a bit stuck on the strange kinky page with the dead fox skin though? What was with that.

[Isabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

the descriptive writing in this book is some of the best I’ve ever read. i kept coming back to this book and then putting it off again because I wanted every single piece of language to sink in properly

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 5 out of 5]

She was walking slower and slower. The furniture, her possessions, her things were so many imperial presences, and she was their subject. She knelt down beside the whitewood packing case and lifted the rags inside. Her angel, her little angel. He was asleep, his muzzle stretched a long way out in front of him, at peace after his long days of running through the countryside. He would sleep forever, and she would wear him always curled round her neck. She began wearing him right away...

This must be one of those great gems of descriptive prose fiction that a reader comes across once in a lifetime. It is a vivid meditation on the bond that develops between an impoverished old woman and a little piece of fox fur. In so doing Leduc charts out a topography of Paris, its sights and sounds, the entire feel of the city, and indeed it is almost like a bird's eye view of Paris like none other- for certainly she takes the great city to pieces here!

There was only the width of the street between her and the Paradise Apartments … The noise was refreshing. Why should she deprive herself of an oasis surrounded by noise? There were people going into the Paradise Apartments, people coming out. She would be like them: she would go in there with him, for him. She had shut him away, she had deprived him of the light, she had brought him to rue d’Hauteville and made him look ridiculous beside all the costly furs there, her little one. No, it wasn’t she who had done it: it was a finger pointing to the name on a street, to a man’s name. Her angel, her little angel, why shouldn’t he have lived in the Paradise Apartments? She invented a past for him, she delved into her imagination; she was so stripped of everything now that she wanted to be able to give.

Although this book is short enough to finish in one sitting, I completed it over the course of three sittings and that was good enough to savor the endlessly beautiful and wonderfully exegetic sentences that arrest you with their topicality and intricacy. I feel that it is a better way to savor the beautiful prose of this novel- for this is a prose poem, a minute saga of the diurnal rhythms of everyday existence. And I feel now, in retrospect, that I will need another read of this classic novella to digest its prose.

[Kam Sova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't a woman just be?

I was ambivalent about The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, but the prose was undeniably delicious.

"Take my sins, all my sins, even the ones I don't know about. I confess them all, because I know you will always be there, because I know you will always catch me in the act. I will give you what you want: a caress for you, a blow for me. I am your dog, and you are in your seventh heaven."

[Yaprak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Küçük Tilkili Kadın, zorluklarla dolu bir yaşama sahip Violette Leduc'ün 1965 yılında yayımlanan bir novellası. Kitap, isimsiz bir kadının Paris'te yoksulluk içinde deliliğin sınırlarındaki yaşamına dair bir kesit aslında. Her gün şehir sokaklarında dolaşan, metro vagonlarındaki çöp kutularına bakan, sahip olduğu kahve çekirdeklerini tekrar tekrar sabırla sayan bu kadın bir gün çöpte bir tilki kürkü buluyor ve hayatta kalmak için kendisine yeni bir oyun icat ediyor.

Ben kitaptan çok fazla etkilenemedim dürüst olmam gerekirse. Şiirsel, deli kadın hikayelerinden hoşlanmıyor olmamın bunda şüphesiz etkisi vardır. Yine de Simone de Beauvoir'la tanıştıktan sonra yazarlık kariyerine başlayan Leduc'ün diğer eserleri de dilimize kazandırılırsa mutlaka okumak isterim.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

A window into the mind of a destitute old woman who has gone mad with hunger and loneliness in Paris. The stream-of-consciousness writing can be hard to follow, but is certainly effective; by the end, you join her in her imaginary world and understand (to a degree) how she thinks.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very difficult book to review. The writing is at times beautiful and sensory and makes you stop to admire. Yet it is so gloomy. In the introduction, Deborah Levy talked about the humour but I struggled to find this in the sad loneliness of this lady, poor and hungry in Paris.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

'To grow old is to wrap ourselves up well so we can wander warmly through our private catacombs.'

We walk through the streets of Paris with our 60 year old unnamed protagonist who lives in a room below the metro, and spends her mornings counting out 36 coffee beans she will use for breakfast. Hunger is her companion which she tries to divert with her rich imagination.

'Rusks or ordinary bread? The rusks would cost more but they would keep. Could she live on a quarter of a rusk a day? People can fast completely for forty-five days without dying, and she always had something to eat everyday, no matter how little, so what had she to complain of? And anyway, she could always count on that drop of water continuing to fall at regular intervals. Time was a necklace: each bead a gleam on her grave. '

She spends her days wandering the streets of Paris and catching the metro. She draws narratives out of coincidences and routine, filling her loneliness with meaning.

'Habit is even stronger than love.'

The origins of her eccentricity is vague. She remembers her parent's despair at her dreamy nature, when she was young, which has now been exacerbated by poverty, loneliness and ageing. She does have a love though, a special guardian angel that she fears she has to part with to eat.

'To find something, no matter how ignorant or how learned one may be, is to dip one's finger into cerulean blue. '

A story that captures how people can be beyond their circumstances and therefore deserve to be seen and not stigmatised.

[Özge · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Hepsi bu kadar olamaz, diyor kendiyle tartışmayı göze alarak, senin için hepsi bu kadar, diye cevap veriyor omurgasından bel çukuruna süzülen soğuk ter.” Böyle umutsuz, çaresiz bir ruh halinde olan ve sefalet içinde sürünen yaşlı bir kadın kahramanın hayat hikayesinin tam ortasına düştüm; çıkamıyorum. En baştan söyleyeyim istedim çok kısa ama çok kasvetli bir roman ‘Küçük Tilkili Kadın’ ve bu bakımdan insanı zorladığı için derin bir nefes alıp başlamalı okumaya.

Kahramanımız Paris’te yapayalnız yaşayan ve açlıkla mücadele eden bir kadın. O kadar yalnız ki eşyayla konuşuyor ve eşyayı konuşturuyor; o kadar aç ki çöpleri karıştırıyor ve evde kalan son küp şekerleri dörde bölüp suya karıştırıyor. Günün birinde sokakta yemek ararken bir kutuda küçük bir tilki kürkü buluyor ve öyküye dair her şey ve tüm duygular daha da yükseliyor.

Violette Leduc zorluklarla dolu bir hayatı tecrübe etmiş. Simone de Beauvoir ile tanıştıktan sonra da yazmaya başlamış. Ben söylemek istediklerini ve anlatım şeklini sevdim. Sayfalardan taşan upuzun paragraflarını yazar kısacık cümlelerinin iğnesiyle nakış gibi işliyor, şimdiki zaman kipi ile de süsleyip daha da etkileyici kılıyor.

[Amena · Rating 4 out of 5]

And just like that, November is off to a flying start. I have to say, I really enjoyed this quirky, odd book. Set in Paris, the plot is about an old woman who lives in an attic flat, counting out coffee beans every morning. She is starving and lonely. When an insect leaves, she mourns it's departure. Forming an attachment to a little fox fur is her salvation. *

The introduction is written by Deborah Levy, and she states the novel has "grand themes: loneliness, humiliation, hunger, defeat, disappointment." I agree, but it also has the notion of love, in the physical sense and what this means and represents to so many of us. I felt so lonely reading these pages, her isolation was so real. I don't think I understood all of it, however; some parts went way over my head 🙊 I'd never heard of this French classic up until now. If you have any recommendations for me in terms of French authors or classics, I would love to hear them.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this so much I ordered it after thirty pages (it was a library book). One of those books you know you will read and re-read and underline and highlight until the pages fall out and you buy another copy. More later...

[Kenning JP Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking and sensitive. A look at loneliness, aging, and poverty. Melancholy and empathetic.

[Tülay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yaşamak basit bir iş aslında, birtakım alışkanlıkları arka arkaya sıralamaktan ibaret. Küçük Tilkili Kadın Violette Leduc.s. 43
Modern çağ insanin yalnızlığını hissettiği bir çağ. Kapitalizmle birlikte sermayenin ortaya çıkması ve emeğin sömürülmesi beraberinde rekabeti getirmiş para tek değer olmuştur. Insanlar daha cok kazanmak icin çalışırken, kendine yabancılaşmış ve insani değerler nerdeyse unutulmuştur. Birbirini anlama , empati yoksunluğu bu çağın en onemli özelliği. Violette Leduc, adeta yalnızlar senfonisini besteleyen bir kadin karakter yaratmış. Paris'de çatı katında yaşayan , çöplerden yiyecek toplayan, yalnızlığını unutmak ve ısınmak için elindeki parayla metroda yolculuk yapan bir yaşlı kadın bu karakter. İnsanlarla kuramadığı bağı eşyalarla kuran deliliğin eşindeki bu karakter bir gün çöpten tilki kürkü bulur. Zamanla insanlarla kuramadığı sevgi bağını bu kürkle kurar . Kürk, yaşlı kadının en iyi arkadaşı ve yaşam amacı olur. Aslinda bir insan için ağır bir trajedir bu. Bu yalnızlık temasını Emmanuel Bove'nun Arkadaşlarım isimli kitabında Victor Bâton karakterinde de görmüştüm. O eserde de Victor karakteri yoksul, yalnız ve sevilmeyi isteyen tutunamayan bir adamdı. En büyük isteği arkadaşları ve dostları tarafından sevilmekti. Bu bakımdan Küçük Tilkili Kadın ve Arkadaşlarım kitaplarının benzer özellikler taşıdığı söylenebilir. İki eserde de Paris'in sokaklarında geziyor ve Paris panoramasını da hayal edebiliyorsunuz. İkinci Dünya Savaşı'nda yaşanan travmalar, kaotik ortam, savaş sonrasında da insanlarda kendine yabancılaşmayı ve topluma yabancılaşmayı ortaya çıkarmıştır. Çoğu yazar, sanatçı savaşın yarattığı travmadan kurtulamamış ve yaşamına son vermiştir. Bu açıdan bakıldığında eserlerde ele alınan yoğun yalnızlık ve sevgi yoksunluğunun anlatılması son derece anlaşılabilir bir durum olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Ben Leduc'un bilinç akisi tekniğiyle yazdığı bu kısa metni sevdim . Okumak isteyenlere keyifli okumalar dilerim.📚📚📚

[belisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

adının vaat ettiği derinliği bulamadım, sıkıcıydı, bu kadar kısa olmasa bitiremezdim bile...

[Miles Edwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

She scattered her limbs across the disorder of the mattress. The roof flew off, and she talked to the owls who do not sleep at night, who gaze down at those who devour and those who are devoured, yet do not see them, and she said: my poor prisoner, if I could set you free...you’d been in prison so long...Her blood: that was her prisoner. She gathered herself together again and listened with compassion to her pulse.

Poetic, tragic, and utterly bizarre, this little novella follows an elderly woman living in absolute poverty in Paris. She is the epitome of an outsider, completely dislodged from reality and society, though living a rich internal life with her strange thoughts. The best way I can explain it is that, while everyone else sees a whole picture, she sees the microscopic grain of it and that is her whole world. Sight, sound, smells, the small details of everyone else’s life - she doesn’t live through others necessarily but she lives in the details of life, which is very intense because she literally has nothing else. She is alone, but she befriends noise and the things people casually abandon like the cigarette packaging that she refers to as a gift:

...going from bench to bench picking up the newspapers that she would then read and reread for weeks on end. She made a tour of the room, inspecting the traces left by passengers now on their way to Meaux, to Souilly, to Claye, to Nangis; orange peel, an empty sweet packet, the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes, a blackened match. They must be kid people, all these fugitives, since they left her these things to remember them by.

Everything is heightened to an extreme degree yet she would be destroyed, she would not exist, without them. When she discovers the fox fur, she sees so much more in it than an item - she treats it as a child, a lover, referring to it as ‘my angel’, and it’s heartbreaking.

I highly recommend reading this in one sitting, as it’s very much like the works of Virginia Woolf - the prose rushes at you, demanding your full attention as it’s very easy to get lost in the flood of imagery and emotion. I have another book by Leduc on my shelves to read, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring her works.

[Bookish Bethany · Rating 3 out of 5]

(PSA, the garish cover does not do this book justice, nor is it accurate to what's within the text)

This slim 20th century Parisian novel performs the kind of elaborate language acrobatics which could appear obfuscating, but it is peculiar, beautiful and deeply touching.

Told from the perspective of a poor older woman lost in the reims of her mind strolling through her neighbourhood and lying on the Metro hungry for croissants, baked goods and cakes from shop windows. She finds a fox fur when hunting for something to eat and makes it her strange companion. She, otherwise alone in her world, becomes bizarrely wed to this fox fur - she cares for it as though it were her kin. The fox fur is a luxury that pivots the text.

This woman worships her home and the limited objects she has, she counts coffee beans every morning, she relishes every bite as though it is her last, she loves every journey she takes on the Metro. This book is a profound lesson on appreciating what we have and understanding our own privilege. It is also a lesson on loneliness and companionship.

[Lydia McMillan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely novella; it reads like a series of illustrations piecing together Leduc's Paris as seen through a tender, playful gaze. Here are a few that stuck with me:

When she sat on the folding chair now with her severe features, her silver hair, her modest eyes, she looked like a lady professor on vacation sitting by the edge of a path. It is not only streams and rivers that flow: a street, with a door set back from it, can slide over into the depths of an abyss. The street was her youth, was all the minutes, the seconds of her existence. (20-21)

The first noises of morning are chilly, and she wrapped her shawl around her. Mariette, Lisette, Odile were sleeping far from their unveiling. Angels, come down and pile their bowls high with delicious sleep. (37)

She would leave the cinema without going in, she would wander about in the square, she would take up her position near the temple of the old Porte de la Villette. In the garden in the middle of the square, she would hide inside the weeping willow and listen to what her parents used to say about her. (39)

If an overhead Metro train whirled past to drown her shouts in its torrent of clanging metal, then she would howl out: I adore you, my adored one. (44)