Volume 5, Number 11 · January 6, 1966
Strange Bedfellows
By Harold Acton
La Batarde
by Violette Leduc, translated by Derek Coltman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 488 pp., $6.95
Witches' Sabbath
by Maurice Sachs, translated by Richard Howard
Stein & Day, 315 pp., $7.50
The Hunt
by Maurice Sachs, translated by Richard Howard
Stein & Day, 176 pp., $5.95
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time. Violette Leduc's autobiography, La Bâtarde, has sold no less than 125,000 copies and one wonders if this could happen outside France. The English translation contains 488 breathless pages of staccato prose occasionally posing as poetry. One pities the conscientious translator and hopes that he is enjoying a well-deserved rest cure after so arduous a task. But why did he not translate the title of the book? Did the prospect of respectable housewives inquiring for The Bastard at their local library deter him? ('Excuse me, ma'm, what did you say?' 'I said Bastard,' sotto voce. 'Are you calling me names?')
Review, 1610 words
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