Sarrazin, Albertine (1937-67). Novelist. A foundling child, born in Algiers and adopted by French parents, she had a troubled early life which led her into teenage rebellion and delinquency, followed by a series of prison sentences, mostly for theft. Her talent for writing was already evident as a schoolgirl, and her diary as a young runaway was published without her knowledge in the magazine Le Surréalisme in 1954. She met Julien Sarrazin, whom she later married, in the circumstances related in L'Astragale (1965), her first and most successful autobiographical novel, which she described as a ‘love poem’ and which narrates her flight from prison with clarity and immediacy. Albertine Sarrazin spent a total of nine years in prison, with some gaps, followed by two years of literary celebrity before her early death, the result of an operation that went wrong. Her second novel, La Cavale (1965 but written earlier), is longer and more discursive than L'Astragale; it is a compelling and disturbing account of life in women's prisons and planned escapes. Her third novel, La Traversière (1966), is about not being in prison, a subject she found harder to handle. After her death several writings were published posthumously, including Lettres à Julien (1971) and Journal de prison (1972). Her voice is at once youthful and disillusioned, her extraordinary and isolated life history reflected in a poignant body of work oddly unrelated to the mainstream literature of the time, a marginal experience expressed in a mixture of vernacular and classical styles.
[Sian Reynolds]
