User:DeRossitt/A Strange Solitude

A Strange Solitude (Une curieuse solitude) is a 1958 novel by French novelist Philippe Sollers.

Overview
Sollers' short story, "Le Défi," published in a collection of work by young writers edited by Jean Cayrol, formed the basis for A Strange Solitude. A Strange Solitude was praised by Louis Aragon, Émile Henriot, and other prominent literary figures.

Sollers has dismissed the importance of the work:

PS: I think there was a period which we could call formalist. That is, for quite a long time, the writers in the group, even I, and many of those working at Seuil either in poetry or in the novel were. . . DH: Would you include yourself when you wrote Une Curieuse solitude in that category? PS: That's my pre-history. Une Curieuse solitude was written when I was very young and according to the code of the French literary tradition, at once neo-classical and. . . That's why I've suppressed it because I think of it as a stylistic exercise, almost as a copy. All right, it was published. It belongs to history. But I can't honestly say that it counts for anything.

Reception
According to Roland Champagne, the praise accorded Sollers' short story "Le Défi" and to A Strange Solitude "launched a brilliant literary career, even if they were for the wrong reasons!" Champagne went on to say this praise was for the wrong reasons "because Sollers was not recognized for the sense of irony and comic mastery that his later narrators would demonstrate. Both of his first publications, 'Le Défi' and Une curieuse solitude, are stories by twenty-year-old men who are very self-conscious. Most of the early reviews of Sollers take these works as serious psychological tales of the self. Even Sollers repudiates these early works as not being consistent with his works beginning with Le Parc (1961). However, despite himself and the reviews from other writers, these two narrators demonstrate that playfulness with the self that becomes fully evident in works such as Femmes (1983) and Portrait du Joueur (1984)."

Champagne writes,

"Written in 1956 and 1957 when Philippe Joyaux was himself twenty and twenty-one years old, they are explorations of the young masculine self in search of an identity via relationships with women, short Bildungsromane leading toward the identity of Philippe the writer, that is, Philippe Sollers.... The issues of masculinity in these first two narratives by Sollers will always haunt his writing."

Kirkus Reviews Pub Date: Oct. 30th, 1959 Publisher: Grove Press https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/philippe-sollers-3/a-strange-solitude/

"Translated from the French and told in the first person this is a sensitive novel about a young man's early love affair and his tentative groupings toward maturity. As a boy of 16 the narrator grew vaguely in love with Concha, the Spanish nurse brought into his household. In the beginning he thought that he was as much in love with Spain and the Spanish language, but it was Concha's indifference and the fact that she resisted his inexperience which made her seem remote and therefore the more desirable. Still the affair leaves him unsatisfied: the workings of Concha's mind evaded him. She leaves the house under mysterious circumstances and it is not until the narrator is 20 that the two meet again in Paris. He had spent a winter full of anxieties and loneliness in a strange solitude in which it seemed as though the world had disappeared. His realization that Concha, who moved through her life with an absolute availability and an absolute detachment was, in a sense, solitude itself, cures him of his youth and he feels that he is saved. There is in this first novel a certain poetic intensity and a discernment which sees and weighs all possibilities without being diminished by the extreme self-consciousness of the narrative."

A contemporary review by G. Pinette, in Books Abroad, when the book was published in French:

This small novel is carried more by the French language than by its own merits. French is a writer's tool of such perfection that even the average appears interesting.

Similar to many modern books, erotism is the mainspring for the action, but again the language helps the writer, since such subjects can be treated in French much more lightly than in any other idiom.

For friends of Spain, a portrait of a Spanish girl should be mentioned, interesting especially in its contrast with the related, and yet different, French brand of Latin culture.