Description
Book SynopsisLove's memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous's writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers' returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love's unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Secon
Trade Review"A rarefied examination of love, passion and the intermittences of the heart, beautifully translated by Peggy Kamuf."
Times Literary Supplement "Hélène Cixous is today the greatest writer in what I shall call, if I may, my language, French. And I weigh my words in saying this. For a very great writer must be a poet-thinker, very much a poet and a very thinking poet."
Jacques Derrida
"A profoundly intense, individual and brilliant piece of work."
David Marx Book Reviews
Table of ContentsI Olivier de Serres—A Single Passion, Two Witnesses
II The Cauliflower of the Lautaret
III The First Lucidity
IV One Time, Avenue de Choisy, Echo, My Love
V First Letters
VI Faithfully Forever
VII When I Become a Frenetic Keeper
IX On February 12th I Committed an Error
