Reading Violette Leduc’s "La Bâtarde" by Deborah Levy

Today’s addition to the ongoing digitization of CONTEXT is a piece that serves double-duty as the introduction to one of the most influential works included in the Dalkey Essentials series: La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc.

La Bâtarde has enjoyed a great amount of notoriety and praise since its original publication by Gallimard in 1964 and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1965. It’s been compared to the work of Jean Genet and Henry Miller for its frank depiction of Leduc’s sexuality and experiences, as well as for its directness and incredible prose. It was reprinted as part of the “Blue Series,” which also includes the (much delayed) Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (more on that and its first-ever reader’s guide, As I Was Saying, coming in the next couple months), Pierrot Mon Ami by Raymond Queneau, Nobodaddy’s Children by Arno Schmidt, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (for which we did a whole season of the Two Month Review podcast), and Chimera by John Barth.

And of all those classics, La Bâtarde has reached the most readers, and is the Essential I’ve most seen on display at indie bookstores across the country.

Another book that’s been reissued as a Dalkey Essential is Billy & Girl by Deborah Levy, part of the “Orange Series,” and a book that might surprise some Levy fans. I’ll run an excerpt later this week to give you a taste of what this is like, but it’s a lot weirder than, say, Hot Milk, the film version of which came out earlier this summer (and is available for rent on Amazon Prime). In Billy & Girl, the titular characters go door to door searching for their mother (by addressing whoever answers the door as “mom”), when they’re not playing some violent games. The ending to this is really wild and lends itself to a few contradictory interpretations . . .

That was the first of two books by Deborah Levy published by Dalkey Archive Press in the early 2000s, the other being Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places, a short story collection that I really loved working on. Both of these came relatively early in Levy’s career, although it was already abundantly clear that she was going to be one of the great writers of our times.

Anyway, below you’ll find Levy’s introduction/CONTEXT piece on Leduc, ...