As We Kneel
This marks Marie Billetdoux’s return to the novel, and one that courses with the sap and fevered activity of youth, the youth of the early 1950s, thirsty for poetry, for literature, in an unrecognisable Paris in the heart of the Latin Quarter whose name and magic and smell have been almost forgotten. Jean La Haut is twenty-one, Lim Houang-Ho, twenty. The Sorbonne, friendships, rue d'Ulm, garret rooms, pitchers of water at the ends of corridors, notes slipped under doors, love, Roman Catholicism, Valéry, Mallarmé, incense, France, old ladies, the countryside…, and, in the pit of everyone’s stomach, a constant fear they are wasting their lives! We are in the realms of both the everyday and the tragic. If anyone says that, after the considerable impact and repercussions of C’est encore moi qui vous écris, Marie Billetdoux has taken on the wild and extraordinary challenge of responding in novel form to her “monster work”, then they are right.
Marie Billetdoux, writing as Raphaële Billetdoux, is most notably the author of Prends garde à la douceur des choses (1976 Prix Interallié), Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1985 Prix Renaudot) and Chère Madame ma fille cadette (1997). In 2006 she first published under the name Marie Un peu de désir, sinon je meurs followed by C’est fou, une fille (2007) and C’est encore moi qui vous écris, published by Stock in 2010.
L'auteur
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