Virginie: Her Two Lives
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
A daring work of postmodern literary fiction, Virginie: Her Two Lives chronicles the parallel existences of an eleven-year-old French girl navigating two radically different erotic worlds — one set in eighteenth-century France under the tutelage of a libertine aristocrat, and the other in 1940s England within a community devoted to sadomasochistic fantasy. John Hawkes constructs a deeply provocative and lyrical narrative that argues for the transformative, even liberating, power of the erotic imagination, presenting Virginie as an innocent yet knowing witness to adult desire across centuries. The novel's tone is at once dreamlike and unsettling, rendered in Hawkes's characteristically dense, poetic prose that blurs the boundaries between innocence and corruption, fantasy and reality. Widely regarded as one of Hawkes's most controversial works, it illustrates his career-long obsession with the dark undercurrents of human sexuality and the aesthetics of transgression. Readers drawn to challenging, boundary-pushing literary fiction will find in Virginie a text that demands both intellectual engagement and a tolerance for moral ambiguity.
Author: John Hawkes
Format: Hardback
Published: 1983, Chatto & Windus / The Hogarth Press
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
A daring work of postmodern literary fiction, Virginie: Her Two Lives chronicles the parallel existences of an eleven-year-old French girl navigating two radically different erotic worlds — one set in eighteenth-century France under the tutelage of a libertine aristocrat, and the other in 1940s England within a community devoted to sadomasochistic fantasy. John Hawkes constructs a deeply provocative and lyrical narrative that argues for the transformative, even liberating, power of the erotic imagination, presenting Virginie as an innocent yet knowing witness to adult desire across centuries. The novel's tone is at once dreamlike and unsettling, rendered in Hawkes's characteristically dense, poetic prose that blurs the boundaries between innocence and corruption, fantasy and reality. Widely regarded as one of Hawkes's most controversial works, it illustrates his career-long obsession with the dark undercurrents of human sexuality and the aesthetics of transgression. Readers drawn to challenging, boundary-pushing literary fiction will find in Virginie a text that demands both intellectual engagement and a tolerance for moral ambiguity.