In His Arms: A Novel [Hardcover]

Camille Laurens (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2004

An international bestseller translated into twelve languages and the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Femina

Our narrator, Camille, loves men. One might say she’s obsessed with them. The latest object of her affection is a psychiatrist, and what better way to seduce a psychiatrist than by laying bare the intricacies of her own mind? Camille becomes his patient and slowly unveils her romantic, sexual, and psychological secrets by telling the story of her life through the men she has known: father, teacher, lover, letch; husband, brother, boss, and friend.

In His Arms was a phenomenon in France, where it became an obsessive topic of conversation among women of all ages. In the tradition of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Susan Minot’s Rapture, it is a stylish, sensual novel about love in all its guises—first love and married love; secret love; adulterous love; frenzied, embarrassed, speechless love—and the story of Camille’s last conquest, one made not by hiding or distorting who she is but by revealing everything.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Laurens's seventh novel was her breakout book: a bestseller in her native France and winner of the Prix Femina, it is also her first to be translated into English. But it will have a hard time finding its footing here. The story follows a novelist and librarian named Camille (who is also working on a novel about a woman named Camille) through therapy, and thus through the stories of her life—specifically, her loves. From her unhappy father and fond grandfather, to her schoolgirl romances and her husband, "a blend of gentleman thief and athletic boatman," to the man she's just fallen for at first sight, whom she ends up engaging as her therapist, "all my life," Camille says, "I have only been interested in men." Her troubles, among them that her parents' union and her own are marked by infidelities and that she has fallen into a consuming love just as her marriage is coming apart, seem very French, as does her solution: upsetting the rules by "seducing a man, but not by the normal approach of concealing everything from him.... But instead by telling him everything." In other words, she seduces her therapist. The sultry prose of this story-within-a-story is broken into chapters ranging from one paragraph to several pages and shifting forward and back in time and point of view (there's Camille the narrator's first-person story, and Camille the character's third-person tale); there's an homage to Barthes and a flash of Lacan. Laurens's novel is a meditation on passion and the self, but it is a self-conscious and humorless one.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* The male-obsessed Camille, a French librarian and author, narrates this tale while her marriage dissolves. She sees a strange man in a restaurant, follows him, and, discovering that he is a psychiatrist, becomes his patient. Camille describes to her editor the nature of her next novel: a book in which the female character is defined, not by women but by men: father, temporary and lasting lovers, husband (on his way out), and the psychiatrist himself. In short chapters, the narration changes from first-person sessions with Abel the psychiatrist to third-person descriptions of Camille's relations to and with the other men in her life, conveying in the process an extraordinary amount of information about the characters' erotic, cultural and religious lives. This challenging, beautifully written story within a story is both self-conscious and clever and is rich with literary references. It evokes such different novels as Milan Kundera's Immortality (1991), where the author participates as a character, and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, with its eroticism and unflattering descriptions of a discarded husband. This best-selling novel won the Prix Femina and has been translated into 12 languages. Tres formidable! Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Random House (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375506527
• ISBN-13: 978-0375506529
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,290,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Tedious, Tiresome and Fascinating, August 14, 2004

By 

jad (Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In His Arms: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was surprised to read in the Publishers Weekly reveiw the same word I used when describing the book to friends....the word self-conscious because that is what makes this book tedious. And yet within the pages there are those obvious insights into men, the husbands, the fathers, and the strangers that most of us have observed over time and yet rarely give voice to. In many ways the book is a cultural exploration of French love in all its manifestations. There are differences in the cultural acceptance of affairs, the sexual needs of both men and women, and mostly in the view of marriage. Although Americans like to think of themselves as sexually liberated we are the puritanical people of our forebearers. This is what kept me reading, these differences, these acceptances of what as Americans we scorn or if confronted with hide with a facade of denial. The book jacket stated that this book was a "phenomen in France" and I would love to hear this this "obsessive topic of conversation" discussed by a French group of men and women. My feeling is that my observations of the book would be considered very plebian....

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hardly interesting..., October 27, 2004

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: In His Arms: A Novel (Hardcover)

A friend of mine loaned me this book because she thought I'd love it. She knows I love foreign literature, especially French novels. I couldn't get into this book though. In His Arms is the story of Camille, a librarian and writer who's in therapy. She tells her life story to her therapist in a series of flashbacks. She analyzes her parents' marriage and her own failed relationships. What transpires is a story within a story in which the author goes back and forth with the story of the narrator and the character in the heroine's novel that is also called Camille.

The story is very complex, very seductive and very French, but it is also very dull at times. The French culture is rather unique, and their uninhibited ways make Americans look like prudish nuns in comparison. However, I did not like the way the story was told. The narration came across as mechanical, the dialogue wooden. I am sure that a lot of the story and the author's voice are lost in the translation. I wish I knew enough French to read the original stories. I couldn't wait to finish this book. If you want to give In His Arms a whirl, I suggest you do as I did -- loan it from a friend.