Word: taxi
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...would see me. Still bleeding. I was sent out of the clinic. My physical condition was disregarded; I was expected to walk to the other office. There were at least three dental assistants on duty at the clinic, but none of them accompanied me, or even arranged for a taxi...
Leduc's fantasies were intense and overpowering, whether they took the form of her novels or of her personal struggle for the affection of Jean Genet--a man who could not have been less interested in her. In The Taxi, she has brought her fantasy life to a new peak, acting out simultaneously the destruction of the incest taboo and the triumph of a form of Oedipal desire--during copulation the boy contemplates the destruction of his parents so that he may spend the rest of his life in the act of love with his sister. Leduc's talent...
Which is not to disparage the artistic qualities of The Taxi. At her most confessional, most obsessive, most uncomfortable points, Leduc was always a powerful writer. The Taxi is skillfully woven, tightly and eloquently written. There is not a spare word in the entire book, nothing out of place, never a sentence used where a word would do. Leduc was a master at achieving effects, and always produced exactly what she intended. By dispensing with all the boring conventions of story-telling and relying completely on dialogue. Leduc achieves her desired impact quickly, and with maximum impression...
...strength of The Taxi is in its unceasing juxtaposition of childhood and maturity, of innocence and corruption. While engaged in as unchildlike an act as any known to man, the two characters remain children: they pack a picnic lunch when they set out for a day of incest, they climb into the back seat of a taxi and tell the driver to take them on a sightseeing tour while they consummate their passion, they tremble in fear at their parents' wrath. The entire book seems suffused with the giggles of children discovering their sexuality for the first time...
...Taxi could well become a minor classic. It is passionate, articulate, and well constructed. But it also is the troubled product of a troubled writer, expressive of the confusion its author felt about her own sexuality. This book, her last, could serve as a good introduction to Violette Leduc. For her conflicting passions are summed up neatly in the dialogue of these two children, exactly the kind of children she herself would have produced...