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The Red Apple
Publisher
:
Editions Phebus
Parution date
:
1996
EAN
:
9782859404291
Description
La pomme rouge recounts the tormented passion of an older man for a twelve-year-old girl who lives with her mother in the apartment across the courtyard. After weeks watching the little girl, this nosy habit turns into an all-out obsession. A decisive encounter at the Palais-Royal gardens makes François decide to write to her.
This epistolary novel, composed by François’ letters to Guillemette, describes the girl’s daily life and the emotions and feelings she stirs up in him. Already conscious of her seductive powers, she subtely and perversely teases him, even including in this dangerous game her innocent mother, whom François seduces in order to get closer to her daughter. The carnal intimacy between François and Guillemette slowly intensifies from suggestive encounters to gestures, kisses and caresses until the little girl reaches adolescence and moves away.
Published for the first time in 1956, two years before Nabokov’s Lolita (though the styles are completely different), this controversial and troubling text is a beautiful meditation on desire and the necessary conjunction between maturity and childhood.
Author
Francis Garnung : Born in 1925, François Garnung lives today in the South of France. After World War II he published several poems, which were illustrated by Marx Ernst and prefaced by Jean Cocteau. He also collaborated on Albert Camus’ journal Combat. He wrote a second novel Les Miroirs et les chênes (Albin Michel, 1965) and a collection of poems, Belle Marquise (Les Impénitents, 1974).
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