Helene [Paperback]

Pierre Jean Jouve (Author), Lydia Davis (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Helene is a succinct and poetic exposition of the themes that fascinated French poet and novelist Jouve following his annus mirabilis 1924-25. In that year he embraced Catholicism and married Blanche Reverchon, a practicing psychiatrist nine years his senior. A decade or so later he wrote this novella, ostensibly about a young boy's love for an older aristocratic woman, but more accurately a mystical rumination on Eros and Thanatos. While staying in the Italian Alps, 16-year-old Leonide sees an apparition, a beautiful woman with fascinating hair "full of folds and clouds, of blood-red sheens, of black caverns, in which my gaze drowned while experiencing the voluptuous pleasure of death." The apparition turns out to be the Countess Helene de Sannis, "a fairy enchantress with an almost divine power hidden in her skirt." Jouve's mystical tendencies make it more palatable for skeptical modern readers to reach beyond his Freudian themes to the beautifully described tableaux and the exquisitely painful tale of intense passion and doomed consummation.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

This novella, originally published in French in 1934, portrays the romantic and sexual awakening of Leonide, a 16-year-old boy who relates the story of his developing passion for Helene, an older woman married to a count. The milieu evoked is Catholic, European, and pastoral, a striking setting for a sensual relationship keynoted by Leonide's fascination with Helene's chevelure , or head of hair. The author takes as his primary theme the interrelatedness of love and death, viewed here with a decidedly Freudian slant that undoubtedly owes something to the influence of his wife, a psychiatrist. Jouve (1887-1976) is not well known in the United States, but Marlboro Press intends to release translations of all his full-length novels over the next few years. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.
- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Marlboro Press (October 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081016003X
• ISBN-13: 978-0810160033
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,641,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars FREUDIAN SLIP INTO STUPIDITY!, July 25, 2001

By 

Sesho "www.sesho.libsyn.com" (Pasadena, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Helene (Paperback)

The word "..." came to mind after I suffered through this book. A sixteen year old boy, eager to see the world, leaves his home and it's not long before we see him brooding in a cemetary over the meaning of life. He runs into Madame Helene de Sannis, a forty-three year old married aristocratic woman and the attraction begins. The passionate "attraction" is focused on her "chevelure", or hairdo. He is weirdly obsessed with her hair and eventually it becomes known as Chevelure like it's a person. The first time he kisses her he kisses her hair, it's like medusa's snakes, he describes it. He comes to stay in her chateau, where she explains to her husband that he is a visting relative. He's a soldier so he's gone most of the time anyway. They continue on in their little childish games for about 100 pages. During which time Helene's nephew shows up as competition for her affection, at least that's how the boy sees it. As revealed on the back of the book, as they are having ... Helene dies of heart failure. Never a sign of ill health in her the whole book and there she is dead. The boy comes to the ridiculous conclusion that she sacrificed her life in order to awaken him to being a man. A think-tank of monkeys with pencils could come up with a better novel than this. It's so ridiculous. The style in which it was either written or translated is second-rate. As an example I offer this sample sentence:

"If she was dead at that moment, dead from love, I was dead too. Was I dead, then? I was not dead, therefore she "was not dead".

I have never read a more horribly constructed sentence. Don't worry. There's more where that came from. Overall, this novel was horrible. Freduian psychology is just another system of philosophy like dianetics which has unfortunately been treated as though it were a scientific system of thought. There are images in here also that the boy believes he is sleeping with his mother in the form of Helene. And that he killed her too. Now some would say that this is mixing the Oedipal complex with the Electra but I forgot to tell you that at times the boy believes he is a girl too. A ridiculous book based on a ridiculous school of thought.