Louis Calaferte (1928-1994) was one of most prolific and controversial French writers of the twentieth century. Consisting of over ninety titles, his published oeuvre includes some forty poetry collections, six volumes of collected plays, an extraordinary rich series of notebooks, several books of short prose, and much-debated novels such as Requiem des innocents (1952), Septentrion (1963), or La Mécanique des femmes (1992)—the latter published in an English translation at Northwestern University Press as The Way It Works with Women. Drafted at the very end of his life and issued posthumously, Le Sang violet de l’améthyste (1998) offers an essential key to the unity of this multifarious body of work. An interconnected sequence of poems, short prose narratives, quotations, and aphorisms, the book brings out all his characteristic themes and displays his various writing styles.
