"The Taxi" was something of a departure from [Violette Leduc's] previous work, and it is a remarkable achievement. In "The Taxi" she takes a vacation from literary exhibitionism to tell a marvelous fairy tale of incest and sexual initiation. The story is cast in the form of a dialogue between brother and sister in the back seat of a taxi-cab which they have transformed into a bower of love…. All day they talk to each other, as only the French can, ecstatically, elegiacly, tenderly, while they make love like two dryads in a tale by Ovid.

The fairytale quality of the story never flags. With well-bred exactness, he and she have planned this day for months….

There is a comic undertone in this petit-bourgeois thoroughness. But the poetry of adolescent sexuality, which Violette Leduc renders so beautifully, the defiant complicity of two young bodies, the mirrorlike responsiveness of...