Madeleine Bourdouxhe

Marie aspetta Marie

Enchanting stories of women's inner lives by the rediscovered Belgian author Madeleine Bourdouxhe The seven stories in A Nail, A Rose confirm Madeleine Bourdouxhe's status as an under-appreciated master of the form. Like her critically lauded novels Marie and La Femme de Giles, these stories tunnel into the conflicted hearts of their female characters in fluid, beautiful prose. These are stories of longing and dissatisfaction, of mundane lives ruptured by strange currents of feeling. A woman, wandering alone and heartbroken, is first attacked and then romantically pursued by a stranger, who returns to her house to offer her gifts. A maid wears her mistress's expensive coat to meet her lover, but finds herself more preoccupied with fantasies of intimacy with her mistress. With piercing insight and candour, Bourdouxhe offers seven unforgettable portraits of the expansive inner lives of ordinary women.

A Nail, a Rose

Elisa's love for her husband is absolute--physically intense and emotionally complete. Gilles is blissfully content with his beautiful wife and family. Neither realizes the fragility of their domestic happiness until an affair develops between Gilles and Elisa's younger sister, Victorine. Deprived of the focus of her existence, Elisa enters an interior world of exquisite anguish, a desperation so profound that she can no longer recognize herself.

La Femme de Gilles

La donna di Gilles

And Other Stories

"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.

Elisa is Gilles' wife and her devotion to him is passionate and all-consuming. Her daily life is permeated by thoughts of him - thoughts of his return from the factory, thoughts of his footsteps on the path as he arrives home each evening, when, in the minutes before his return, she is overcome with paralysing anticipation. But when Gilles suddenly finds himself powerfully and helplessly attracted to Elisa's younger sister, Victorine, Elisa's world is turned upside down.

Monika Schlitzer

Roman

Auf der Suche nach Marie

Edith Klapwijk

Een vrouw houdt zo reddeloos veel van haar man dat ze hem zelfs adviseert bij zijn overspel met haar zuster.

De vrouw van Gilles

Marie

Frankreich vor dem Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Marie ist dreißig, glücklich verheiratet, von ihren Freundinnen beneidet, weil sie die Einzige sei, die ihren Mann aus tiefstem Herzen liebe. Doch bei einem Urlaub am Meer entdeckt sie, dass ihr diese Liebe nicht reicht. Zu oft fühlt sie sich innerlich einsam. Eines Nachmittags am Strand fällt ihr Blick auf einen jungen Mann. Sie fühlt sich zu dem zehn Jahre Jüngeren hingezogen, und er sich zu ihr. Sie beginnen eine Affäre. Marie empfindet dies weder als Verrat an ihrer Ehe noch als Grund, sich von ihrem Mann zu trennen. Ohne Reue genießt sie ihre erwachte Sinnlichkeit und genießt es, sich in ihr neu kennenzulernen. Mal distanziert beobachtend, mal mit großer emotionaler Nähe, immer präzise und zartfühlend, zeichnet Madeleine Bourdouxhe die Psyche einer glücklichen modernen Frau jenseits der Konventionen.

Marie is so devoted to her husband Jean that she overlooks his casual betrayals. Yet, with surprising ease she takes a lover - a young student whom she encounters on holiday in the South of France. Marie remains tied to the realities of her life.

Madeleine Bourdouxhe

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