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There is no romantic story told in this semi-autobiographical novel. Don't expect a prostitute with a "heart of gold" who fell into a bad place due to financial difficulties and died a tragic death like in the movies after living a miserable life. A young woman who is dragged into prostitution because of her constant desire to seduce, and because her life takes a course that brings her to the brink of death; We are faced with a prostitute in flesh and blood who is too real to fit into clichés. Using the name of his dead sister while practicing this oldest profession, questioning his family, desires and choices while looking for a way out of the hell he created...
The core of this novel is an innocent diary. Nelly Arcan describes the emotional turmoil she experienced while working as a prostitute in Montreal in her early twenties; While she was writing down her thoughts on her own past, personal history and womanhood, she was of course unaware that the scream of despair and anger rising from the pages of her diary would one day open the doors of the world of literature to her. It was a scream of pleasure that contained something both archaic and disturbing, and a scream of destruction that was shameful in its intimacy. When The Prostitute, in which Arcan describes the stages of his awakening to life and a "descent into hell" process that spanned years, in the form of a monologue and an inner outburst, was published in France, he asked the same old, dry questions: "Is it literature or not? How can autobiography be literature?" brought up the debate once again. So, could lived experience be literature? So everyone's life was a novel. Although The Prostitute is presented as a realistic novel, an autobiography, a confession, a testimony, Nelly Arcan says that "the aesthetics of literary bias and hatred" distances her from reality from time to time. For he believes neither in pure fiction nor in pure autobiography.
A radical book about male-female relationships at the beginning of the 21st century.
Stanley Péan, Librairie Pantoute
