Book Review: Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc

 

⋆⋆½

Content Warning: homophobia.

Thérèse and Isabelle are two schoolgirls, attending the same boarding school in France. Though Thérèse has convinced herself that she hates Isabelle, she is also fascinated by her, spending much of her time thinking of Isabelle's beautiful flaxen hair. After an encounter one night, the two girls fall hopelessly into a deep, erotic love, knowing that it can't last and yet holding onto each other with remarkable violence.

Originally published in 1966, Thérèse and Isabelle was heavily censored for its frank depictions of love between women, not to mention its explicit eroticism. I've wanted to read this for a long time; it's considered a bit of an obscure classic of lesbian literature, and Violette Leduc is such a fascinating person -- everything I read about her intrigues me more. While the content does include many sex scenes between the two girls, it's not explicit like we think of today. You can turn on HBO and see worse. At the time, in fact, there were actually far more graphic erotic novels, many of them also challenged (Miller's Topic of Cancer and Burroughs' Naked Lunch come to mind), but Leduc's is singular in the fact that it depicts female pleasure with no qualms.

For the reasons I've listed above, it's worth a read, but my main problem is simply that the language is so abstract that it takes away entirely from the purpose of the story. There's more of a focus on the emotional aspect of their sexual relationship than the actual physical action, which elevates the depth of feeling when you are reading about them. It's the kind of obsessive love that only young women can truly understand, a desire to consume and be consumed that leaves all else either nonexistent or simply unimportant.

But back to the language: this doesn't seem to be an error of translation, but rather simply Leduc's style, carving out such obtuse metaphors that it sometimes took me several rereadings of a sentence to truly grasp what it is that Leduc is trying to say. It isn't that I'm unused to obscure or unique styles of prose, but in my opinion, some passages are actually painful to get through because it feels as if they are saying so much without saying anything at all.

I enjoyed the concept of this story more than its actual content, but nonetheless, I do think it's worth a read if you are particularly interested in Leduc (as this is based off not only her own experience as a lesbian, but specifically her experience being in love with another schoolgirl during her adolescence), but the style certainly won't be for everyone.