There are men who know how to talk to women, and there are others who know how to talk about them. Jean-Paul Enthoven is possibly both at once, but above all, he is one of those who know how to write marvelously about women, about those he knew and loved and those who just passed through his life, images from magazines or ships passing in the night, sometimes embodied on film.
In his new collection, La Dernière Femme, Jean-Paul Enthoven, writer, literary critic and editor, dives into the exploration of his soul and chooses to summon nine women—nine like so many muses—in whose portraits—like in a mirror—his own self-portrait is etched.
The beauty of this collection is due as much to the nine women themselves, all demonic angels of love, death and freedom, as it is to the elegance of Jean-Paul Enthoven´s pen, who writes like people don´t write anymore, with finesse and melancholic charm.
Of the nine women presented in this collection, eight are already well-known from literary, intellectual, artistic or society life, on this side of the Atlantic or the other, including Françoise Sagan, Louise Brooks or Zelda Fitzgerald. The ninth, the last woman (la dernière femme), is an unknown for the reader, but not for the narrator, because she is his last woman, at once sublime and mysterious, like the eight others, like all other women.
Because what sets this collection apart is the ease with which Enthoven captures the essence of femininity, sparing his models nothing, in their flashy heights as in their darkest depths, and so gives a sketch of the Woman in her perpetual quest for the absolute, willing to do anything to reach it, even to resign herself to the most radical degradation. This Woman who illustrate the following excerpt:
“It is dangerous to glimpse, however briefly, who we truly are. In general, one never recovers from it. It is as if God gave us the right, just one time, to enter the kingdom of the dead – then to return, stunned, among the living.” (p. 103)
Are there still muses like these? Literary and artistic icons like those of the 1970´s—the likes of which we haven´t seen since? It doesn´t matter after all, because in this collection, Enthoven builds them one last pedestal, a final homage, that of his sharp style: though sometimes cruel, always tender and admiring.
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