Camille Claudel: A Novel
Alma H. Bond, psychoanalyst-turned-author, offers the reader a beautiful, yet highly disturbing portrait of Camille Claudel, the gifted French sculptress from the late 1800s who was mistress to famous sculptor Auguste Rodin in her latest novel. Told in the form of a memoir, Camille pens her life from her early childhood to her very last days, giving a grim glimpse of her love/hate relationship with her mother, her love, edging on incest, to her younger brother, her struggle with the male-dominated artistic establishments of the time, and her turbulent, obsessive, destructive affair with Rodin, who was a married man.
Beginning with Camille, now a very old woman who has survived decades of involuntary incarceration in a lunatic asylum in the French countryside, remembering the first time she fashioned a family out of garden mud and how those figurines so impressed her father that he swore lifelong support, this story is engrossing to the end. Though Bond's research on Claudel's early years is impressive, her writing is at its best and most authoritative when she describes Camille's slow and painful descent into madness. Bond, herself a psychoanalyst, describes a surprisingly fragile psyche traumatized by her inability to accept Rodin's choices and the increasingly intense paranoia that led her to believe that Rodin was persecuting her even after his death. Complicated by a painful relationship with her mother and a possibly incestuous relationship with her brother, the story carries the reader as Camille slips deeper and deeper into self-destruction until she is removed to an asylum where she remains for thirty years.
Camille Claudel: A Novel
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