ABSTRACT
Exhibiting a remarkably evocative style, Michele Desbordes’s achievement contradicts Edgar Allen Poe’s famous dictum that only short stories—not novels—enable readers to be gripped by “the immense force derivable from totality.” The darting insights and troubling recurrent imagery of Desbordes’s long, intricate sentences eerily mirror the mental processes governing a misunderstood, mistreated, exceptionally gifted woman. As the novel progresses, flashbacks to Camille Claudel’s earlier bohemian life in Paris fill out the portrait of a brilliant, naturally skilled, hardworking sculptor who, as Desbordes observes, immediately “learned the techniques of her art as would a person who already knows them.” With a sort of incantatory solemnity, Desbordes recreates Holderlin’s bursts of introspection and acute perceptions as he walks back toward Germany. Even as La Robe bleue recurrently depicts Camille sitting near the gate of the mental asylum, waiting for her brother to arrive, Desbordes’s tales typically progress in mesmerizing spirals.
