Isabelle ou L'arrière-saison

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Awards
Prix Renaudot 1970

Presentation

Paul lives away from the world, in a hamlet in the Haute-Provence region. This taciturn writer has his seventeen-year-old daughter, Isabelle, stay with him during the holidays. He almost never sees her and immediately succumbs to her charm. The attraction is mutual: unchaste and sensual, Isabelle does everything to seduce her father. And if Paul resists the temptation to commit incest, he does not do it on moral principles, but because he prefers fantasy to reality. Disappointed, Isabelle throws Maryvonne, her best friend, in his arms, then returned to Paris where she becomes an apprentice actress. Paul joins her there. He reenters the literary life while he does not leave Maryvonne but he cannot stop thinking about Isabelle. How can he get rid of this forbidden passion, if not by devoting a novel to it?

Jean Freustié (whose real name is Pierre Teurlay) was born October 3^rd, 1914 in Libourne. He was raised in a wealthy family and his father was a wine merchant. He studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux and Algiers, was an intern at the Hôpitaux de Bordeaux (1936) later moving to Paris where he became an occupational health doctor in 1950.

With his first novel, Ne délivrer que sur ordonnance (La Table Ronde, 1952), he made his entry in the literary world. He spent time in the Procope café where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Françoise Sagan, Bernard Frank, Jean-Louis Curtis, François Nourissier, Jacques Chardonne, Paul Morand, Cocteau or Ionesco.

He joined France Observateur as a literary critic in 1961 and received the Prix Roger-Nimier two years later for his novel La Passerelle (Grasset, 1963). At the same time, he worked as a literary critic for the Nouvel Observateur (1964) and became a literary adviser at Denoël. He received the Prix du roman de la Société des gens de lettres in 1969, the Prix Renaudot in 1970 for Isabelle ou l’arrière-saison, and contributed to the Dictionnaire des œuvres érotiques (Mercure de France, 1971) the following year. He died in 1983.

The writer Salim Jay dedicated a book to him, Jean Freustié, romancier de la sincérité (Le Rocher, 1998).

In 1987, Christiane Teurlay-Freustié, second wife of the writer, his friends Nicole and Frédéric Vitoux and the writer Bernard Frank, founded the Jean Freustié prize which celebrated its 25^th anniversary in 2012.

“A great stylist whose uncluttered writing has not aged.” La Vie

“Freustié was a writer, a real one, whose writing had the effervescence of champagne.” Madame Figaro

“It is always a mistake to think you can define the modern man as a man of his time: this one only complies with a few major attractions. What is modern often appears to us afterwards, when things in times gone by, and while wearing the same colors, continue to alert us today. By this yardstick, and twenty-five years after his death, reading Jean Freustié could be a lesson to some of our most contemporary figures, sometimes a little too anxious to melt into the froth.” Le Magazine des Livres