Customer Reviews

Helene

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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.