Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Observer, PopMatters, and Sydney Morning Herald. The true story of a love affair between two extraordinary women becomes a literary tour deforce in this novel that recreates the surrealist movement in Paris and the horrors of the two world wars with a singular incandescence and intimacy.In the years preceding World War I, two young women meet, by … intimacy.
In the years preceding World War I, two young women meet, by chance, in a provincial town in France. Suzanne Malherbe, a shy seventeen-year-old with a talent for drawing, is completely entranced by the brilliant but troubled Lucie Schwob, who comes from a family of wealthy Jewish intellectuals. They embark on a clandestine love affair, terrified they will be discovered, but then, in an astonishing twist of fate, the mother of one marries the father of the other. As “sisters” they are finally free of suspicion, and, hungry for a more stimulating milieu, they move to Paris at a moment when art, literature, and politics blend in an explosive cocktail.
Having reinvented themselves as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, they move in the most glamorous social circles, meeting everyone from Hemingway and Dalí to André Breton, and produce provocative photographs that still seem avant-garde today. In the 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism and threat of fascism, they leave Paris for Jersey, and it is on this idyllic island that they confront their destiny, creating a campaign of propaganda against Hitler’s occupying forces that will put their lives in jeopardy.
Brilliantly imagined, profoundly thought-provoking, and ultimately heartbreaking, Never Anyone But You infuses life into a forgotten history as only great literature can.
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On the Channel Islands two women are resisting the Germans the only way they know how through their art. The book then takes a look back at how these two women met, fell in love, lived in Paris and later moved to the Channel Islands. The book is based on the lives of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun and the author has done a lot of historical research. Sometimes the author tries to drop so many real life names that the reader can be overwhelmed. I really enjoyed the book after they moved to the Islands and left Paris behind. The book is well written and easy to read. The author does a very good job with the historical setting. Enjoy this Historical Biography
In pre-WWI France two young girls meet and fall in love. They grow up and move to Paris and become part of the artistic renaissance of the between-wars period; they are present at the birth of Dadaism and Surrealism. As approaching war becomes evident they move to Jersey. During the Nazi occupation they wage their own war of resistance, papering the island with subversive leaflets.
Eventually they get caught and sentenced to death, but are saved by the withdrawal of German troops ahead of the allied liberation.
One dies not long after, her health ruined. The other lives on for many years until old age prompts her to end her life on her terms.
“Once dead, I will no longer be aware of being without her. That’s why the past eighteen years have been so difficult. It’s not true what they say. Time heals nothing.”
A fictional biography of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Never Anyone But You is the story of a great love and enduring partnership that spans the two 20th century world wars and the chaotic, socially liberating, artistically fertile period between them. It is an unsentimental portrait told with restrained, spare, evocative prose, and sheer pleasure to read. Recommended!
Found on the website transgressivefiction.info, it is an interesting choice to include Never Anyone But You in the “transgressive fiction” tent. It contains little of the usual canon; this is not a story of rebellion via drugs, criminality, nihilism or self-destructive decadence. Claude and Marcel defy oppressive norms by creating a happy and long life together, by not internalizing the normative paradigm but designing and defining their own.
“I refuse to allow myself to be defined by a few biological characteristics. When I stand in a room by myself, I’m not standing there as a woman. I’m a consciousness. An intelligence. Everything else is secondary.”
Society does not grind them under its heel as they rebel to an inevitable, bitter end, they triumph over it. And that illustrates a broadening definition of transgressive fiction that can only enrich the genre.
If the bloated center of a bell curve represents society (“everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” as Emerson tells us), then transgression extends in many directions; sometimes the most subversive act is to flourish and prosper.
Mary Whealen
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