What Does A Woman Owe ...?

In prose as florid as the worst Victorian novel, I wrote the following brief book review last summer:

"In prose as verdant as the Vietnam tropics during the French colonization -- the book's setting -- Catherine Texier's novel Victorine poses the eternal ambivalence of woman toward marriage and love ... and the ways in which marriage and love are most often separate states.

The subjugation of the French colony of Vietnam forms a metaphor to subjugation faced by the heroine at the turn of the century ... as she chooses between the stifling stability of her marriage or an unmoored existence with her lover."

I loved this book for its ambivalence, the most authentic emotional state. Written by a woman who had chronicled the death of an affair in her nonfiction Breakup: the end of a love story, the novel delicately posed brutal questions:

What does a woman owe her husband? Her children? Herself?

Texier's answers are beautifully drawn, unsettling, and satisfying. I encourage you to read the book.