Pierre Jean Jouve

Recounts the myth of the goddess of the underworld known for her witchcraft and black magic.

"In 1921, when he would have been thirty-three, Jouve met Blanche Reverchon, nine years older than he and a doctor and practicing psychiatrist. They married in 1925; that year he rejected as unsatisfactory, as not worth preserving everything he had published until then: about twenty different works, the effort of about twenty years. His relationship with Blanche Reverchon, which continued until her death in 1974, transformed his life, his inner life above all. From his position of a Christian mystic he came round to beholding that inner life as grounded in the Freudian unconscious, where the essential drama is the conflict between Eros and Thanatos." "In that same year, 1925, began to appear the prose writings informed and animated by his new vision. Four novels and a final volume of shorter fiction, extending from Paulina 1880 to La Scene capitale (1935), make up Jouve's narrative oeuvre." "The novella published here under the title Helene (and which was originally titled Dans les annees profondes) is the conclusion and, it is generally agreed, the high point of Jouve's achievement as a writer of fiction. Helene is the story of the passion of a sixteen-year-old boy for an older woman. Their adventure, unfolding within an atmosphere of myth, culminates in Helene's death in her young lover's arms at the climax of the sexual act. Never, as David Gascoyne observed, did "the theme of the interrelation between love and death that predominates throughout Jouve's writing [find] better expression than here."" "Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976) has come to be regarded as one of the outstanding - and one of the most European-French writers of the century. Amongst us he has been largely neglected up until now: some of his poems have been made into English, notably by Gascoyne and by Keith Bosley, and published here and there over the years; his wonderful Mozart's Don Juan has passed practically unnoticed; and of Jouve's fiction nothing has appeared in our country beyond the novel Paulina 1880, brought out in 1973 following the release of the film adaptation of the book." "The Marlboro Press plans in 1994 and 1995 to publish translations of Jouve's full-length novels: Le Monde desert, Hecate and Vagadu, and to reissue Paulina 1880."--BOOK JACKET.

Set amid the glamour of the intellectual, worldly, artistic and feminist circles of 1920s Europe, this is the first half of the Adventure of Catherine Crachat. Catherine is a film star—an inconstant wanderer, she is compared to Hecate, the lunar goddess--in search of her destiny. Having returned to Paris after a sojourn in Vienna that has been fraught with emotional entanglements and the taint of death, Catherine seeks new relationships that will give her life meaning, but she finds that no one is who he or she appears to be. In an emotional tumult, events--both real and imagined--spiral out of her control, and Catherine turns to psychoanalysis to reconcile a past in which love and death, debasement and the search for divinity merge and divide in haunting, kaleidoscopic ways.

"Paulina 1880, published in 1925, strikingly prefigures the French "new wave" in fiction. In Pierre Jean Jouve's first novel, Paulina - said to be the most beautiful woman in Milan - enters a passionate affair with a married man. Her love for Count Michele Cantarini is all-consuming, yet Paulina is plagued by its impurity in the eyes of her family, of society, of God. The death of her father, and the subsequent death of the Count's wife, send Paulina into an abyss from which neither her love for Michele nor her faith in God can rescue her."--BOOK JACKET.

Set in Switzerland during the first decades of this century, The Desert World focuses upon the troubled relationships uniting three remarkable characters: Jacques de Todi, the homosexual son of a pastor; Luc Pascal, a French poet; and Baladine Nikolaievna, a mysterious and fascinating Russian woman involved with them both. This novel is a potent exploration of the destructive power of sexuality and the interrelationships between love and death.