Title: Darling - Jean Teulé - book
Summary :
One evening, a young woman approached Jean Teulé.
Curiously dressed, she seemed to have stepped out of a Deschiens sketch, but her gaze, her gait and her mocking confidence intrigued the writer.
She said her name was Darling, and she wanted to tell her story so that he could write a book about it. She believed they would both do a great service to their contemporaries by showing that you can always recover despite the violence and disasters that befall you.
Listening to Darling's story, Jean Teulé heard the eternal lamentation of those who cross the abominable deserts of lives without affection, without respect, without resources. But he also discerned the voice of an astonishing personality, the voice of a woman capable of staring misfortune with insolence and speaking of it with astonishingly accurate words. Of her brother, who died strangely in a road accident, she would say : When I saw him, his head pierced by an iron bar that had fallen from a truck, I thought he looked like a table football player .
A succession of hard blows, rebuffs, humiliations, ruined dreams, moral and physical torture, his life was a long, slow fall down the social slide of a merciless France, a descent into hell where each stage left him with an incurable scar.
Jean Teulé did not want to write a biography; he tried to convey, through novelistic writing, the baroque and tragic trajectory of an exceptional woman who was overwhelmed by fate, who was ignored and despised by society and who, however, continued tirelessly to fight to give her life coherence and purpose.
Thanks to this tender and terrible novel, also funny, Jean Teulé – whose first book Rainbow for Rimbaud was a huge success – confirms the full depth and richness of his talent.
