Astragal albertine sarrazin biography

'My Albertine, how I adored her! Her luminous eyes led me through the darkness of my youth. She was my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps. And now she is yours.'

At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 99 cents on a novel that would change her life forever. The book was Astragal, by Albertine Sarrazin. Sarrazin was an enigmatic outsider who had spent time in jail and who wrote only two novels and a book of poems in her short life - she died the year before Patti found her book, at the age of twenty-nine.

Astragal tells the story of Anne, a young woman who breaks her ankle in a daring escape from prison. She makes it to a highway where she's picked up by a motorcyclist, Julien, who's also on the run. As they travel through nights and days together, they fall in love and must do whatever they can to survive, living their lives always on the edge of danger. A bewitching and timeless novel of youthful rebellion and romance, this new edition of Patsy Southgate's original translation includes an introduction by Patti Smith.

Albertine Sarrazin (17 September 1937 – 10 July 1967) was a French author. She was best known for her semi-autobiographical novel L'Astragale.

Life and career

Albertine was born on 17 September 1937 in Algiers, French North Africa. Her teenaged Spanish mother abandoned her and left her with the Welfare Office, where officials named her Albertine Damien in honour of the saint of the day she was found on. At the age of 2 she was adopted by a French army physician and his wife who renamed her Anne-Marie. Following the family's move to Aix-en-Provence in 1947, she was raped by a male relative. Constant quarrels with her adoptive family led to an intense distaste for authority that stayed with her the rest of her life.

Although she was intelligent and did well in her studies, Albertine's family set to annul her adoption and in 1952 placed her in a reformatory school in Marseille, the Refuge of the Good Shepherd. She passed an examination to graduate from secondary school at the age of 16 before escaping the school and travelling to Paris where she reunited with Emilienne, a love interest from her school. Albertine worked as a prostitute and the pair were arrested in 1953 after a bungled armed robbery of a dress store. Sarrazin received a seven year sentence and was imprisoned at the Fresnes Prison. During her time in prison and at the reformatory at Doullens in Picardy, she started writing prose and poetry.

Incarcerated for four years, Sarrazin escaped from the Doullens reform school in April 1957. She broke her ankle during the escape and was picked up by Julien Sarrazin, a truck driver. The pair were both criminals and both went to prison following their arrest in September 1958. They were married on 7 February 1959 while Albertine was still imprisoned. The two continued to live lives of crime, spending time in and out of jail and keeping contact through letters.

Albertine

The Slate Book Review is proud to publish Patti Smith’s introduction to Astragal, the 1965 novel by Albertine Sarrazin, which is being reprinted this month by New Directions.

Perhaps it is wrong to speak of oneself while writing of another, but I truly wonder if I would have become as I am without her. Would I have carried myself with the same swagger, or faced adversity with such feminine resolve, without Albertine as my guide? Would my young poems have possessed such a biting tongue without Astragal as my guidebook?

I discovered her, quite unexpectedly, while roaming Greenwich Village in 1968. It was All Saints Day, a fact that I later noted in my journal. I was hungry and craved coffee, but first ducked into the Eighth Street Bookshop to inspect the reduced fare on the remainder tables. They held stacks of Evergreen Reviews and obscure translations from Olympia and Grove Press—new scriptures shunned by the populace. I was on the lookout for something I had to have: a book that was more than a book, containing certain signs that might spin me toward an unforeseen path. I was drawn to a striking, remote face—rendered violet on black—on a dust jacket proclaiming its author “a female Genet.” It cost 99 cents, the price of a grilled cheese and coffee at the Waverly Diner, just across Sixth Avenue. I had a dollar and a subway token, but after reading the first few lines I was smitten—one hunger trumped another and I bought the book.

The book was Astragal, and the face on the cover belonged to Albertine Sarrazin. Returning to Brooklyn by train, devouring the meager flap copy, I learned only that she was born in Algiers, was orphaned, had served time and had written two books in prison and one in freedom, and had recently died, in 1967, just shy of her 30 birthday. Finding and losing a potential sister all in the same moment touched me deeply. I was approaching 22, on my own, estranged from Robert Mapplethorpe. It was to be a harsh w

To me, Albertine Sarrazin appeared as the patron saint of delinquent writers, of winged eyeliner, of broken bones, of thieves. I was a 23-year-old with a penchant for petty theft and fare evasion, minor crimes that made me feel lawless and alive. I found her semi-autobiographical novel, Astragal, while stocking the shelves of a bookstore and read it in a single day. It starts with a jailbreak modeled after Sarrazin’s own: The narrator, Anne, jumps the prison wall and drops 30 feet to freedom. She breaks her ankle.

Albertine Sarrazin had a crooked smirk and dark hair framing her impish face. She was born in 1937 and died in 1967 at the unripe age of 29, due to complications during a kidney surgery. She was unrestrained by the fetters of society, loving intensely, living outside the law, writing fervently and unashamedly. When I look at photos of Sarrazin, I want to hold her head in my hands and kiss her, then run away with her. I want to be her. I tell myself that I’m not that far off. In reality: I am 25; I live in my parents’ garage; I am in love; I cannot move. Sarrazin comes to my aid.

I keep my skateboard in the trunk of my car. I have more persistence than innate skill: I go skating every day. There’s always an underlying unease that I might get hurt, which I try to drown out with the exhilaration of learning something new. I work as a barista at a local bakery and I make a dollar less than minimum wage. If I cannot stand, I cannot work.

In the last month of 2020, while trying to land a trick, I gracelessly fall off my board with my foot underneath me and hear a crack somewhere within it. Suddenly, my ankle is tenderly thickening in front of my eyes. At home, I ask my mother how to know if it is broken or sprained and she says if it’s broken, I will go into shock. Well, there is a shaking deep, deep inside me that I cann