Margins
A Strange Solitude book cover
A Strange Solitude
1958
First Published
3.40
Average Rating
154
Number of Pages
A finely wrought novel of a sixteen-year-old boy's initiation into love by a woman twice his age, this work has been hailed both here and in the author's native France as the revelation of an outstanding new talent. With an amazing maturity for his twenty-two years, the author examines every fleeting phase of adolescent love, in a manner reminiscent of Radiguet's now classic Devil in the Flesh. Not satisfied simply to experience love, the narrator strives constantly, and often desperately, to transfix each new emotion, each new moment of tenderness, anguish, physical passion, despair. Through the alchemy of his often brilliant prose Sollers has attempted to recreate this experience fully, from the awkward impatience of youth to the final dissolution of love into a new awareness of man's strange but inviolable solitude.
Avg Rating
3.40
Number of Ratings
62
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
32%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
8%
goodreads

Author

Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers
Author · 13 books

Philippe Sollers (born Philippe Joyaux) is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel (along with the writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet), published by Seuil, which ran until 1982. In 1982 Sollers then created the journal L'Infini published by Denoel which was later published under the same title by Gallimard for whom Sollers also directs the series. Sollers was at the heart of the intense period of intellectual unrest in the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. Among others, he was a friend of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. These three characters are described in his novel, Femmes (1983) alongside a number of other figures of the French intellectual movement before and after May 1968. From A Strange Solitude, The Park and Event, through "Logiques", Lois and Paradis, down to Watteau in Venice, Une vie divine and "La Guerre du goût", the writings of Sollers have often provided contestation, provocation and challenging. In his book Writer Sollers, Roland Barthes discusses the work of Phillippe Sollers and the meaning of language. Sollers married Julia Kristeva in 1967.

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