A Nail, A Rose by Madeleine Bourdouxhe

Madeleine Bourdouxhe is now receiving the recognition she deserves. Where better to begin appreciating her than with A Nail, A Rose, a collection of strange feminist stories about women in Western Europe after WWII? There are women that endure, battle, fantasize, compromise, and empathize with the world around them, which is dark, twisted, hilarious, and scary. Madeleine Bourdouxhe was born in Belgium in 1906 and lived through both World Wars, by which time she had become a published author. Marie, her most renowned novel, was originally published in 1943, while the Second World War was still raging throughout Europe.

One of the great feminist French novels, A Nail, A Rose is a compilation of observations on the lives, ideas, and experiences of women of all kinds in post-World War II Europe. Many of them have a surrealist twist to them, combining grim and visceral gore, obsessions with the flesh and bone of human beings, and the banal and prosaic facts of our daily existence.

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43512282