As her husband walks out of their 20-year marriage to live with Noëllie, a young and brilliant lawyer, Monique’s world is instantly shattered. So much so that she comes very close to losing her sense of self. If not for its subtle construction, The Woman Destroyed would be a classic novel of love’s labour’s lost. In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir defines her narrative technique as an attempt to make silence speak. Her intention was to show, through Monique’s diary, the extents to which she would go to ignore the truth.“There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I’ve lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, “authentic” woman, without mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, “harmonious.” It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.” ― Simone de Beauvoir,The Woman Destroyed
La Femme rompue / The Woman Destroyed, a novel by Simone de Beauvoir, translated from the French by Patrick O’Brian
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A woman, recently left by her husband, empties her bank account, and moves to Venice. It’s winter; the tourists are gone. At the pension house she is staying at, our narrator meets a Russian aristocrat in a wheel chair, a young dancer, and her lover. As she wanders along the canals, she discovers a bookseller who is deeply in love with the city and who will progressively make her feel alive again…A love story in wintery Venice by the international bestselling author of The Waves (Les Déferlantes).
Seule, Venise, a novel by Claudie Gallay, Le Livre de poche.
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The day that she realizes that she has no desire to move in with her lover—W—and in all likelihood, never will, our narrator decides to put an end to their 6 years old relationship. But when W calls to inform her that he has met someone else and that he is about to move with that person, the narrator’s life shifts into an all-consuming jealousy that permeates even the smallest details of her existence.
Annie Ernaux describes this obsession, less as a desire to win over W anew than a fiction that feeds on the meaningless crumbs of reality, a poison that invades all and keeps you from seeing life from other perspectives.
L’Occupation, a novel by Annie Ernaux, Folio / The Occupation, a novel translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Seven Stories Press
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Moment d’un couple is an irresistible novel that is told like a thriller and focuses on the frailty of love. Juliette is an IT engineer; she lives with her husband and their two children in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Paris. They seem to share a fulfilling, modern life, until the day Olivier announces to Juliette that he is having an affair with a senior officer of the Socialist Party, named V. V is brilliant, young, and determined to make Olivier divorce his wife. Moment d’un couple is the sincere, humorous and moving account of the war in which Juliette fully engages in order to win back her husband and save her family.

Adultery, manipulation, bullying, conjugal battles, and disillusionment sustain the pace of this universal story of betrayal and passion.

Moment d’un couple, a novel by Nelly Alard, Folio —Other Press
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Lol V Stein, married with kids, returns to the city of S. Tahla, a city where, 10 years ago, her fiancé at the time, Michael Richardson, left her for another woman, during a ball.
The novel invites the reader into a world both familiar and strange. Reading The Ravishing of Lol Stein is a complete experience in itself. It requires that you give in to its spells, to its asymmetrical dialogues, and that you enter a narrative that keeps moving forward though the story itself has long since ended.”Personally, Tatiana did not believe that Lol Stein’s insanity could be traced back solely to that ball, she traced its origins back further, further in Lol’s life, back to her youth, she saw it as stemming from something else. In school, she says, there was something lacking in Lol, she was then strangely incomplete, she had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become. In school, she was a marvel of gentleness and indifference, she changed friends with abandon, she never made the least effort to combat boredom, nor had she ever been known to shed a sentimental school girl’s tear. When the rumor of her engagement to Michael Richardson first became known, she, Tatiana, had only half believed it. Who could Lol have found, who could ever have captured her unfinished heart?”

 The Ravishing of Lol Stein / Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, a novel by Marguerite Duras, translated from the French by Richard Seaver, Pantheon Books
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