Customer Reviews

Laure: The Collected Writings

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Laure's writings which were previously only available in French (pub 1977) are now gathered in this spellbinding volume. Her sickly life and early death (aged 35) make for dark, tightly written meditations on mortality, life and love. her love affair with writer Georges Bataille makes for compelling reading as her desperation at being sick with TB makes her cling to him more. The biographical sketch also sheds light on a key unrecognised figure in the Paris / Surrealism 30s scene. This was a charismatic woman who not only appears in Bataille's fiction buut also on Blanchot's Death Sentence. A must have for any french literature fans. Beautiful stuff. Much loved by the late kathy Acker.

Reading the collected writings of Laure one can easily understand why Bataille loved her with such passion. Indeed, Laure lived and wrote with such passion that she shames everyone who is "content with a petty life" and who "abandons the ardor of living through fear of suffering."

I can little expound on the praise already lavished on this must-read, the author of which could just as well be living and breathing contemporaneously with the rest of us. The book resurrects her floral and yet edgy philosophies, which to my mind are timeless and gravely still apropos. Poetic and fluid, strangely and necessarily harsh at times, Laure's beautiful ambling takes a curious mind and engages it so fully as to permanently tattoo her perspective with a shockingly pointed brevity. Whether or not it stays with you forever, her writing will indelibly leave a delicate mark.