Lili [Hardcover]

Abigail De Witt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2, 2000

"Lili's hold on a reader will be no less ferocious than her grasp on life."—Susan Dodd, author of Mamaw

Lili is the intimate story of a passionate woman poised against twentieth-century Paris. Coming of age prior to the First World War, Lili loses her first love and her brother in that conflagration. She finds herself reawakened by a former soldier. Their uneasy relationship, the caring for their disabled son, and the flowering of friendship with a beautiful Jewish woman leave her inner resources tested during the next war. Yet Lili emerges as her own woman, deeply reflective, spirited, and still fervent. Reading group guide included.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Loss of faith, life with a mentally disabled child, an inscrutable husband and a mariage blanc: any of these subjects might daunt the most experienced novelist. Tackling all of them and more, De Witt seems mired in the challenges of her debut work. Set in France and opening early in the 20th century, the novel charts the life of Lili Ravaudet from childhood to deep old age, from Lili's earliest memories of growing up on the outskirts of Paris with her twin brother Maurice, her older brother Andr?, and her beloved cousin Claude-Fran?ois to a lonely moment at a provincial train station after everyone she loved has died. Claude Fran?ois and Andr? both perish young, as soldiers during WWI. Andre has, however, sent a letter to Lili, "the only one who ever loved" him, announcing his plans to kill himself while in the service because he's "tired of doing what other people want." Lili loses her faith in God, though she continues to be plagued by Catholic guilt and existential anguish. Turning to philosophy for comfort, she becomes a lyc?e professor and falls in love with a geography teacher, Pierre. Once they are married, their passion dies, another source of anguish for Lili, and their son turns out to be retarded. Lili becomes reacquainted with a school friend, Paule Jacob, a woman whose passion for the physical world challenges Lili's more abstract ardors. Lili and Paule have a secret love affair, until Paule, who is Jewish, becomes obsessed with Catholicism. All this is narrated with great reverence for every nuance of Lili's anguished thoughts and feelings. The problem is that many of the other characters remain frustratingly opaque. The reader never knows more than Lili does about her husband, for instance, though the book is narrated in the third person. The last quarter of the novel covers 40 years, from the beginning of WWII to the mid-1980s, and it is here that the narrative finally begins to acquire momentum. Scenes are pleasingly compressed and slip gracefully from present to past, offering a glimpse of the subtlety and depth De Witt achieves at her best. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

At age four, Lili, De Witt's French heroine, idolizes her deeply religious mother. As she grows older, she becomes more devout, and her family assumes that she'll become a nun. However, when her beloved cousin Claude-Francois is killed in World War I, Lili is devastated; and when her brother, Andre, commits suicide, she turns away from God completely. She moves to Paris, where she goes to college, gets a job teaching philosophy, marries another professor, and writes a book about atheism. But her spiritual journey is far from over, and far from predictable. After the birth of her mentally retarded son, Lili's marriage begins to fail, and she throws herself into a lesbian affair with a Jewish woman who is fascinated with Catholicism. Eventually, Lili finds herself in despair, and is forced to reexamine her beliefs about God and her disdain for religion. First-time novelist De Witt skillfully explores the nature of love as a door to the experience of the Divine, and the relationship between sexual and religious ecstasy. Bonnie Johnston
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 307 pages
• Publisher: Triquarterly; 1 edition (June 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810151006
• ISBN-13: 978-0810151000
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,410,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Abigail DeWitt was born in Chapel Hill, NC in 1959. The youngest daughter of two theoretical physicists, she spent her childhood summers in the Alps, where her mother, a Frenchwoman who had come to the US at Robert Oppenheimer's invitation, ran a summer institute for physicists. DeWitt's fiction, like her childhood, is set partly in a France still impoverished and reeling from WW2, partly in an America enjoying its peak of prosperity. The recipient of several grants and awards, including a Michener Fellowship and a Tyrone Guthrie Fellowship, DeWitt is the author of two novels, LILI and DOGS, as well as a forthcoming collection of stories. In all of her work, she explores her characters' secret, contradictory impulses, and the longing to love and be loved that propels us all.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fearsome Thing . . . to fall into the hands of God, December 1, 2000

By 

Elizabeth Bowles (Acworth,, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lili (Hardcover)

Abigail De Witt's first novel, Lili, is blindingly brilliant and beautiful. With deft strokes, she paints a panaramic view of Lili's internal world, plumbing the depths of the shadow side of the personality. With a sure sense of craftsmanship, De Witt takes the reader to the edge of the abyss, all the while showing the very thin line between the Divine and madness. Lili lives her life honestly and intensely. Deeply religious as a child, she loses her child-like faith with the death of her older brother, Andre. Some would say she had a failed marriage. I say she lived a strange, but love-filled, mostly asexual marriage. Piere is wholely believable in his acetisism and madness. Her devotion to her retarded son, also a strange, almost abstracted devotion, is poignant and touching. The passionate but short-lived sexual involvement with her friend Paule, a Jewish poet is, nevertheless, a lifelong love affair. Finally, while seeming to lose her faith, she in deeply spiritual throughout the length of the book. Her brutal devotion to truth is a type of spirituality in itself. One could even say that 'to question is the answer'. A novel totally engaging and captivating throughout! A must read.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars LILI, December 4, 2000

By 

"rallard" (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lili (Hardcover)

Abigail DeWitt's ability to weave sensuality and emotional intelligence into her characters is startling. Here is a perfect example of the richness of the female voice expressing the importance of a human being's interior life. Ms. DeWitt cuts to the bone with unique grace and narrative skill!

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the sort of book you're always looking for, July 12, 2000

By 

Stuart Bernstein - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lili (Hardcover)

LILI is one of those rare and special novels that takes the reader in completely unexpected directions. The strange spiritual journey of LILI--through love, war, motherhood, and religion--is captivating from start to finish. The novel's focus on this very particular and complex heroine has universal reverberations. The writing is original and extremely well-crafted, full of marvelously wrought symbolism and emotional drama. I'm thinking of reading it again.