Books about Claudel from Amazon.com

A bestseller in France and winner of the Prix Renaudot, By a Slow River is a mesmerizing and atmospheric tale of three mysterious deaths in an oddly isolated French village during World War I.

The placid daily life of a small town near the front seems impervious to the nearby pounding of artillery fire and the parade of wounded strangers passing through its streets. But the illusion of calm is soon shattered by the deaths of three innocents–the charming new schoolmistress who captures every male heart only to kill herself; an angelic ten-year-old girl who is found strangled; and a local policeman’s cherished wife, who dies alone in labor while her husband is hunting the murderer. Twenty years later, the policeman still struggles to make sense of these tragedies, a struggle that both torments and sustains him. But excavating the town's secret history will bring neither peace to him nor justice to the wicked..
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Until now, the 19th-century French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864- 1943) may have been best known for her much-romanticized relationship with sculptor Auguste Rodin, who has been erroneously portrayed as abandoning the fragile Claudel to a nervous breakdown. But this first fully researched biography of Claudel abolishes the myths attached to her life and asserts the brilliance of her art.

Drawing upon ample unpublished material, including family photographs, private letters, and medical records, Odile Ayral-Clause reveals the truth about Claudel's affair with Rodin and about her confinement and death in a mental asylum. Using Claudel's own words, she describes the crushing reproofs and prejudices the sculptor confronted — from her family, from society, from the male-dominated art world. For art historians and feminists, such issues are as relevant today as they were in fin-de-siècle Paris. .
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As the First World War rages on, the daily life of a small town near the front is hardly disturbed by the report of artillery fire and the parade of wounded in its streets But within the space of a year, this illusion of ordinary days is shattered by the deaths of three innocents—a charming schoolmistress from “the north,” who captured every male heart only to take her own life without apparent reason; an angelic eight-year-old girl, who is strangled, her body abandoned by the canal; and the cherished wife of the local policeman, who dies in labor while her husband is hunting the little girl’s murderer.

Twenty years on, the policeman still struggles to make sense of these mysteries that both torment and sustain him. In the pages of his notebooks he continually—desperately, obsessively—summons up the past and its ghosts. But excavating the town’s secret history will bring neither peace to him nor justice to the wicked. And as his solitary detective work continues on these long-closed cases, we come to see that his efforts can lead only to an unimaginable widening of the tragedy.

In the policeman’s simple, plangent voice--full of unflinching scrutiny and the compassion of weary experience--Philippe Claudel gives us a tale of galvanizing suspense and an indelible meditation on morality.

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