From Publishers Weekly
Born in Paris in 1903 to an affluent, conservative Catholic family, Colette Laure Lucienne Peignot rebelled against her bourgeois background. Using the moniker Laure, she recreated herself, adopting a decadent lifestyle, radical politics and an anguished voice for her poetry, prose and essays. Published in English for the first time, these are the collected works of a marginal figure associated with better-known writers and political dissidents of the Parisian avant-garde between the wars. Laure worked for and financed the leftist journal La Critique sociale, which published some of Georges Bataille's most important essays as well as those of other surrealists and Marxists. At 31, she began an intense affair with Bataille, dying in his home four years later of tuberculosis. Laure destroyed much of her writing that, had it survived, might have made this collection a more coherent, cohesive whole. As it is, the book would have benefited from more historical background and explanatory material to aid the general reader. The interest here lies more in how Laure's letters, poems, political essays and journal entries capture the essence of an era and reveal a tortured, self-conscious artist who never had a chance to mature.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
8
And If Hardship
Animal Artists
Archangel Or Whore
Bataille
The Centaur
The Crow
Ecce Homo Name By Which One Designates The Depiction Of J.c
Esmeralda
Everything That Depends Only On Total Integrity.
Fragments
Go On Even Senseless Later It
The God -- Bataille
The Greatest Strength
I Too Am Well-trained...from Hour To Hour.
It Must Be Quite Vexing, This Insidious Worm Consuming The
Last Poem: I Saw Her
Libertinage: The Stages Of Laure
Life Replies -- It Is Not Vain
Machiavelli %god %neurosis
Outskirts Of Towns
Poems (before The Summer Of 1936)
Poems And Texts
Priests
The Sacred
Solitude Gnaws Like A Cancer
Story Of Donald
A Strident Voice Yells And Prevails:
This Cadaver Drifting With The Current
To Live? No More Meaning No More Criterion
Trust %and Values
[where Do You Come From?]
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