Le putain

Le putain

French

ISBN : 2-89135-039-1 | 48 pages | $5 | | Guernica

In French only. Available from the publisher

Guernica

“Le Putain” is Guy Verville’s first pub­lished text. A uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent is wait­ing for the woman who has been sup­port­ing him for two years.

Fifteen minutes late. She'll be here soon. She has been coming soon for two years, swallowing fifteen minutes of her time, or rather of her soul. Two years at the rate of once a week multiplied by fifteen minutes. Paul counts the drops of water; the count is difficult. He's going to get his calculator: 1560 minutes. Twenty-six hours.

Review

A very beautiful language

Guy Verville’s Le Putain, a short sto­ry bare­ly fifty pages long, evokes in an enig­mat­ic and enchant­i­ng style lone­li­ness, infin­i­ty, the imbal­ance of the body that deserts the soul and the ensu­ing insid­i­ous and treach­er­ous humil­i­a­tion. With the city as a back­drop, always seen from the win­dow of the room of sweet tor­ment, the city that goes through all the pain it has to live uncon­scious­ly in its road veins.…

In a very beau­ti­ful lan­guage, which can be deci­phered like a cryp­togram, there is a log­ic close to the math­e­mat­i­cal mon­ey, often men­tioned, which impos­es its rules on the dai­ly life and style of the writer. On a prose that is both pre­cise and sibylline, which gives rise to mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions, and offers numer­ous avenues for reflec­tion[…] Le Putain leaves us with a desire to return there. And to search fur­ther in the read­ing all the sens­es offered here.

M.-C. Fortin, Voir (1991/05/28)

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