Helene [Paperback]

After his marriage to a psychiatrist nine years his senior, Jouve's work, once marked by the great Christian mystics, became grounded in the Freudian unconscious, site of the conflict between Eros and Thanatos.Hélèneis the story of a sixteen-year-old boy's passion for an older woman. Originally published in 1934, it is considered the high point of Jouve's prose career.

After his marriage to a psychiatrist nine years his senior, Jouve's work, once marked by the great Christian mystics, became grounded in the Freudian unconscious, site of the conflict between Eros and Thanatos. Hélène is the story of a sixteen-year-old boy's passion for an older woman. Originally published in 1934, it is considered the high point of Jouve's prose career.

Pierre Jean Jouve (1887, Arras, Pas-de-Calais - 1976) was a French writer, novelist and poet.

Jouve was a writer who thought with his senses, who believed with the tools of his skepticism and whose work always lives best through the webs of shadow thrown by death.Hélènedoes a good first job of returning him to us, complex and apart and incomparable as he was. --Ross Feld,Chicago Tribune

Never did the theme of the interrelation between love and death that predominates throughout Jouve's writing [find] better expression than here. --David Gascoyne