Madman’s Memory

Title: Madman’s Memory
Genre: Fiction
Author: Roger Vercel (1894-1957); translated from the French by Warre Bradley Wells.
Jacket Design: Riki Levinson (c.1922-2013)
Publisher: Random House, New York, New York.
Year: 1947
Pages: 216
Format: Hardcover, with dust jacket.
Provenance: Previous owner's bookplate inside front cover, name obscured with marker. Also contains a two-sided leaflet from the Book League of America with a listing of alternate selections for this book on one side, the other side being an illustration of a saucy maiden in a fancy room, watched over by a stern butler-type.
From the Dust Jacket: “Madman’s Memory is the story of Françoise, who married Luc la Hourie out of pity, out of the importunate demands of the flesh, out of the desire to dwell in the security under the protection of a solid bourgeois family. The sea claimed her strange husband early in their marriage and Françoise lived on in widowhood in the company of her half-crazed mother-in-law.”
Opening Sentence: “Françoise was driving fast in the flat country.”
Random Passage: “The ebb tide helped them. They glided swiftly past the left bank, close to yellow rocks, below thinly planted thickets. At one point, they passed through a belt of white and rose petals: apple-blossoms snowing down from the top of a steep field. A dory laden with gravel, very low in the water, went by to starboard. Two men were rowing it, keeping well in to the bank to take advantage of the eddy.” br>Notes: Vercel was a well-regarded French author who apparently held a long-lasting fascination with oceans and other bodies of water (as evidenced by the passage above!). Kirkus described Madman’s Memory as “effective, often affecting, but Vercel is not for a general American audience.”