La Femme de Gilles
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A haunting, slim novel which has the mesmeric inevitability of a classical tragedy." --Independent on Sunday
La Femme de Gilles tells the story of a fatal love triangle—written on the eve of World War II.
Set among the dusty lanes and rolling valleys of rural 1930s Belgium, La Femme de Gilles is the tale of a young mother, Elisa, whose world is overturned when she discovers that her husband, Gilles, has fallen in love with her younger sister, Victorine. Devastated, Elisa unravels.
As controlled as Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment and as propulsive as Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, La Femme de Gilles is a hauntingly contemporary story of desperation and lust and obsession, from an essential early-feminist writer.
Just after her novel was first published in 1937, Madeleine Bourdouxhe disassociated herself from her publisher (which had been taken over by the Nazis) and spent most of World War II in Brussels, actively working for the resistance. Though she continued to write, her work was largely overlooked by history . . . until now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This 1937 novel, a portrait of a Belgian housewife driven to desperation, established Bourdouxhe as an early, essential feminist author. The "giddy" Elisa whiles away her days eager for her factory worker husband, Gilles, to return home until the evening when her younger sister, Victorine, drops by and Gilles is filled with "spontaneous desire" that leaves him "dumbfounded, unable to move." They begin an affair, and once Elisa finds out, her once-happy "monotonous existence" lurches suddenly onto "a course of misery." But Victorine is a "fickle" lover, and when Gilles finally tells Elisa of his angst about their relationship, Elisa's love leads her not to scorn him, but rather to assume the "unusual position of confidante." Even as Gilles rages, "If I caught her with one of those other guys I might kill her," Elisa counsels, "You can't truly love her if you say a thing like that." As Gilles's jealousy drives him to violence, Elisa remains "inhibited by this overwhelming love of hers," and as she careens towards tragedy, what emerges is a heartrending study of the compromises a woman is willing to make to preserve her marriage. In Bourdouxhe's hands, love is contorted from a source of stability into a force that can leave a woman lying in bed and weeping "little strangled tears, a handkerchief over her mouth so as not to wake Gilles."
