Astragal [Paperback]

The prose is hard-boiled, funny, sometimes gross, oscillating between indolence and intensity, riddled with ellipses and exclamation points. It is wayward, hard to pin down; it cant be forced to behave. There are associative leaps, synesthetic flights, and characters introduced without preamble or identification. Sarrazin brooked no exposition, no laborious knitting of circumstance to circumstance. One might call her style stream-of-consciousness, but that modernist term fails to account for the impression of Pop hyperreality that communicates itself through her steady drumbeat of allusions.WithSarrazins career may have been tragically curtailed, but her legacy is a novel that grateful readers are discovering now, almost 50 years after her death.The story  drawn from Sarrazins own life  of Annes escape from prison, subsequent incapacitating ankle break (the book is named for the bone she snaps), and arduous recovery, is so alive with Annes voice that reading it, one wants simply to remain in her presence, to sit by her bedside as she squirms, frustrated, towards recovery. Anne makes good company.Smith's essay and Sarrazin's crackling and incandescent prose make?As alive as a Godard movie, this lost classic of 60s French literature is back