Street Girl Author:Muriel Cerf Street Girl is no ordinary coming-of-age novel, but rather an apprenticeship of the imagination. Lydie Tristan, a renegade born into a postwar European world that craves stability, is nourished in childhood by exotic fantasies while menaced by real-life teachers and parents who lash out with the fury of primitive demons. In the soon-... more »to-end innocence of the early 1960s, Lydie's world is shaped by: Polline, her friend in arms, with whom she discovers Rin Tin Tin, boys in black leather, and the famous Drugstore; the prostitute Hughette, who talks of philosophy as easily as of the hair-raising episodes of her own youth and the tricks she turned; Abel, her stand-in pimp, a homosexual who exposes Lydie and friend to the world of art and culture and Willhelm Reich; her Aunt Ro, sweet and spacey, a fairy godmother who facilitates her revolt, herself rumored to have murdered her husband soon after their wedding; and her grandfather, who bequeaths to her deluxe editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which she cherishes as talismans of her future calling. With the rigor and tenderness that characterize Francois Truffaut's film The 400 Blows, Cerf follows her innocent enfant terrible along the path of rebellion through the early '60s, which ultimately leads her, in joy and sorrow, across the borders of her homeland, the whole world now her home. Street Girl is a vision of youth to come in the '70s and '80s, expressing a raw anger at the world of adults, school, authority, and society.« less