Beau Clown

An astounding revelation of one child's nightmare world. Blurbed as "perhaps the most remarkable novel ever written by a child," this "astounding revelation of one child's nightmare world" was the creation of one of those youthful-literary-prodigy-sensations of the time, a barely-literate 14-year-old French farm girl who was able to get it down on paper with the help of a neighbor, Eliézer Fournier, who explains his contributions in an explanatory note at the beginning of the book. Based on her own experiences and on stories told to her by her father (who had spent some time in a mental institution), the book is an episodic account backgrounded against "the daily spectacle of poverty and promiscuity -- the extraordinarily primitive existence of the peasants," and involving prostitutes, American Negro G.I.'s, three escaped lunatics (including the title character), and her own "large (and unrestrained) family." (The New York Times reviewer called it "clearly the work of a highly unbalanced personality.")