Astragal
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
'My Albertine, how I adored her! Her luminous eyes led me through the darkness of my youth. She was my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps. And now she is yours.'
At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 99 cents on a novel that would change her life forever. The book was Astragal, by Albertine Sarrazin. Sarrazin was an enigmatic outsider who had spent time in jail and who wrote only two novels and a book of poems in her short life - she died the year before Patti found her book, at the age of twenty-nine.
Astragal tells the story of Anne, a young woman who breaks her ankle in a daring escape from prison. She makes it to a highway where she's picked up by a motorcyclist, Julien, who's also on the run. As they travel through nights and days together, they fall in love and must do whatever they can to survive, living their lives always on the edge of danger. A bewitching and timeless novel of youthful rebellion and romance, this new edition of Patsy Southgate's original translation includes an introduction by Patti Smith.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her 1965 semi-autobiographical debut composed while in prison for a botched hold-up, Sarrazin conjures Anne, a young French girl of the streets, helpless but full of lust and dreams. Patti Smith, in her introduction, calls this book the "bone that fused fact and fiction," and this piece of bone assumes center stage when Anne jumps from a prison wall and shatters her ankle: "I've flown away, my dears! I flew and soared...for one second, which was long and good, a century." Thus begins her flight from incarceration to immobility. She is rescued by Julien, an ex con who makes love to her and moves her from his Mother's home to a roadhouse and finally to Paris. The ankle does not heal, nor does Anne's need for Julien. Readers will relish Anne's lack of symmetry; her smoking, drinking, whoring, and thieving through the Parisian streets of the 1950's. She contemplates her failures with a cat-like need to pick herself up and pretend nothing hurts, while limping through her days looking over her shoulder in fear of being caught. This is the poetry of a beautiful, misplaced mind; echoing freedom, recklessness, and daring. Sarrazin blends the sadness and joy of youth, exuding vibrant passion.
