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Books Like La Femme assise by Guillaume Apollinaire
Apollinaire's only novel — a Bohemian adventuress from Spain to Paris and beyond
The posthumous picaresque novel (1920) about the Bohemian Elvire drifting through an imagined America, Switzerland, and Paris — Apollinaire's most sustained prose narrative, mixing his characteristic fantasy and realism in a full-length story of female independence and adventure.
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Buy on AmazonAlcools
by Guillaume Apollinaire
The poetry that the novel complements — reading both shows the full range of Apollinaire's imagination, from concentrated lyric to extended picaresque narrative; the same obsessions (love, exile, the wandering artist) appear in both but in completely different forms.
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Le Poète assassiné
by Guillaume Apollinaire
The semi-autobiographical prose fiction (1916) is the closest companion to La Femme assise — both are Apollinaire's prose imagination working in extended narrative, and reading them together gives the full picture of his fiction.
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Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
The great French picaresque philosophical tale (1759) is the most obvious formal model for La Femme assise's structure and satirical mode — Apollinaire inherited the picaresque tradition from Voltaire and transformed it into a modernist mode.
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Buy on AmazonJacques le Fataliste
by Denis Diderot
Diderot's experimental picaresque novel (1796) is the other major French formal predecessor — the digressive, self-conscious narrative that interrupts itself to discuss its own story; La Femme assise shares the picaresque looseness and the pleasure in storytelling as performance.
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Buy on AmazonCalligrammes
by Guillaume Apollinaire
The wartime poetry collection (1918, same period as the novel's composition) — reading the visual poems alongside the picaresque narrative shows the same period of Apollinaire's life being processed in two completely different forms.
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L'Enchanteur pourrissant
by Guillaume Apollinaire
The mythological prose poem (1909) is the predecessor of La Femme assise's prose mode — both mix fantasy and realism, though the Enchanteur is more purely mythological and the Femme assise is more picaresque and comic.
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Buy on AmazonUne vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's great novel of a woman's life (1883) is the French realist tradition that La Femme assise is both using and departing from — where Maupassant's Jeanne is passive and tragic, Apollinaire's Elvire is active and adventurous; the contrast defines what Apollinaire was reimagining.
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Poèmes à Lou
by Guillaume Apollinaire
The posthumously published love poems from the front — more personal and immediate than the novel, and useful for understanding the emotional life of the same period in which La Femme assise was composed.
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