Marguerite Yourcenar

Anna, Soror...
with
An Obscure Man
and
A Lovely Morning
0-00-271222-9
Translated from French (Comme l'eau qui coule..) by Walter Kaiser.

Fast-moving stories, set in the 16th and early 17th, visceral, revolving round sexual relationships. Not prurient, the account is matter-of-fact.

AOM and ALM go together. They are about this dutchman Nathanaël, who is swept though life, and never really knows what's happening to him. Not quite like any other chronicle. I liked it. Anna, Soror... is an intense and troubling tale of consensual incest, in the family of a spanish aristocratic occupying Naples, in which the principals are tortured by religious scruples, and tragedy reigns.

The book includes very interesting 'Postfaces', in which Yourcenar writes about the process of composition. It includes a survey of incest in literature, and this:

With Anna, Soror..., I tasted for the first time the ultimate privelege of the novelist, that of losing himself completely in his characters, or of letting himself be possessed by them. Thoughout those few weeks ... I lived uninterruptedly within those two bodies and those two souls, slipping from Anna into Miguel and from Miguel into Anna with that indifference to sex which is, I believe, that of all creators in the presence of their creations, and which silences with shame those who would express astonishment that a man could excel in depicting a woman's emotions -- the Juliet of Shakespeare, the Roxane or Phédre of Racine, the Natasha or Anna Karenina of Tolstoy ... -- or the rarer paradox that a woman could create a man in all his essential masculinity, whether the Genji of Lady Murasaki, the Rochester of Jane Eyre, or the Gösta Berling of Selma Lagerlöf.

MY was the first woman elected to the French Academy. She died in 1987.

Shelving it, I saw and remembered Zeno of Bruges. This was a gift from a friend who tries to improve my mind, but my mind proved resistant to improvement. I found it unreadable, at the time, and set it aside, implementing my 'life is too short' policy. Perhaps, if I live, I will give myself another chance with it, someday. But right now, the to-read shelf is 2.5 linear metres, and that doesn't count all sorts of other books that are likely to interlope. Besides, one should read french writers in french.