"Indie" Published Review: Camille Claudel: A Novel

Since Parlez-Moi Press is an independent publisher, I am well aware of the boom in independent publishing and the challenges it presents. Because this blog has been around for such a long time now and because it is fortunate to get the amount of traffic it does, I have decided to use it to occasionally publish my reviews of independently published books here. If you are an indie author or publisher and wish to know more about this service, please contact me by email at: inquiry@parlezmoipress.com.

I also want to add that I have created a page where interested readers can find two sample stories from my books and the first chapter of The Old Mermaid's Tale. I realize that one of the biggest concerns some readers have about buying indie books is uncertainty over the quality of what they are buying. I don't blame them. So I hope that these three stories will give you a taste of the style and quality of my work. They are:
• "Flynnie & Babe" - one of the stories included in My Last Romance and other passions
• "Home-made Pie and Sausage" - my 2005 story for Level Best Books' annual crime anthology
• Chapter One from The Old Mermaid's Tale

I hope that you enjoy them. Now, on to our review:

Camille Claudel: A Novel by Alma H. Bond

To write the story of Camille Claudel, one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of art, is an ambitious and bold undertaking. Claudel, who was born in France in 1864 and died in an insane asylum in 1943, was arguably one of the most gifted sculptors of her time and one of the first distinguished female sculptors of the modern era. Alma H. Bond’s book Camille Claudel: A Novel, though written as a fictionalized biography, is a thorough portrait of Claudel.

Written from the perspective of the aged Claudel, confined to the Montdevergues Asylum for over thirty years, the story begins when the child Camille shows an interest in making shapes out of mud, much to the chagrin of her conventional mother. The recounting of Camille’s formative years through her early education in Paris and apprenticeship to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, is filled with detail and awareness of how the interrelationships of her family members shaped her personality. As she begins her career as a sculptor, as well as her role as both muse and lover to Rodin, the story is meticulous in recounting the development of her art and her unique and independent personality.

Bond has done an impressive job of researching her subject and her descriptions of the places Camille lived, studied, and worked are thorough and exacting. The author’s portrait of the fiery and temperamental artist and the many personalities who filled her world are rich. Bond’s knowledge of Claudel’s day-to-day life and the growth of her art is breathtaking in its scope and completeness. She paints a vivid portrait of a ferociously independent and rarely talented young artists struggling to overcome the prejudices of her era and to deal with her passionate and ultimately obsessive love for Rodin, her mentor and the great love of her life.

Written in the first person, Camille has a "voice" that is at times elusive, the only flaw in this otherwise richly-crafted story. The author’s use of contemporary expressions and figures of speech and some American slang seem somewhat out of place coming from the pen of a seventy-nine year old French artist raised in the Victorian era. Still, Camille was a woman out of time and perhaps some readers will find the contemporary voice more accessible.

Though Bond’s research on Claudel’s early years is impressive, she is at her best and most authoritative as she describes Camille’s slow and painful descent into madness. Bond, herself a psycho-therapist, 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, Camille slipped deeper and deeper into self-destruction until she was removed to an asylum where she remained for thirty years.

Camille Claudel: A Novel is an ambitious work in both detail of the life of the artist and in a study of her decline. The world will never know the extent of Camille’s genius as an artist because she destroyed so many of her own works but Bond has given us a sensitive and richly detailed account of a life that was too afflicted by tragedy to achieve the greatness that was its right.

Available from Amazon.com.

Thanks for reading.