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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/still-life/"></div><p>I had a difficult time, while reading Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s <em>La Femme de Gilles</em>, separating it from the recent events in U.S. politics. A man who has bragged about sexually assaulting women has won the presidency over the woman who would have been our first female president. Originally published in 1937 by Éditions Gallimard in Paris, and reissued this fall through Melville House as part of their Neversink Library series, it is not fair to Bourdouxhe to bring today’s politics into my reading of <em>La Femme de Gilles. </em>And yet, she might have understood. Friends with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Bourdouxhe was a member of the Resistance in France and Belgium, and is known to have worked with surrealist artist Paul Éluard to sneak political leaflets from Paris into Brussels. In the 1940s, when the Nazis took over Gallimard, Bourdouxhe cut ties, never publishing with them again. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/still-life/#more-2700" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Still Life: on Madeleine Bourdouxhe&#8217;s <em>La Femme De Gilles</em>

Still Life: on Madeleine Bourdouxhe&#8217;s La Femme De Gilles

Amina Cain is the author of&nbsp;<i>Creature</i>, out with Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is working on a novel.