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Choice of the Elect

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Edmée lacks for nothing. Her adoring husband is a handsome and cosmopolitan engineer, they have two beautiful children, and they live a prosperous life in California. But all is not what it seems. Edmée is tortured by anxiety attacks. And her daughter Claudie shines with a disturbing inner knowledge.

Choice of the Elect follows Edmée through the seriocomic adventures that ensue when she deserts her husband. Edmée believes herself to be on a holy mission and over the years takes up with a series of mysterious lovers and finds success in Hollywood--all with Claudie in tow. Yet over time, Claudie rejects her, and Edmee comes to wonder whether this is tragedy or the price the holy must pay for being elect.

245 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

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About the author

Jean Giraudoux

477 books75 followers
Greek mythology or Biblical stories base dramas, such as Electra (1937), of French writer Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux, who also wrote several novels. He fathered Jean-Pierre Giraudoux.

People consider this French novelist, essayist, diplomat. and playwright among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. They note his work for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy. The relationship between man and woman or some unattainable ideal in some cases dominates themes of Giraudoux .

Léger Giraudoux, father of Jean Giraudoux, worked for the ministry of transport. Giraudoux studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and upon graduation traveled extensively in Europe. After his return to France in 1910, he accepted a position with the ministry of foreign affairs.
With the outbreak of World War I, he served with distinction and in 1915 became the first writer ever to be awarded the wartime Legion of Honour.

He married in 1918 and in the subsequent inter-war period produced the majority of his writing. He first achieved literary success through his novels, notably Siegfried et le Limousin (1922) and Eglantine (1927). An ongoing collaboration with actor and theater director Louis Jouvet, beginning in 1928 with Jouvet's radical streamlining of Siegfried for the stage, stimulated his writing. But it is through his plays that gained him international renown. He became well known in the English-speaking world largely because of the award-winning adaptations of his plays by Christopher Fry (The Trojan War Will Not Take Place) and Maurice Valency (The Madwoman of Chaillot, Ondine, The Enchanted, The Apollo of Bellac).

Giraudoux served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.

He is buried in the Cimetière de Passy in Paris.

His son, Jean-Pierre Giraudoux, was also a writer.

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