Description

The Grove Press [Published Date: 1967]. Hardcover, 127 pp. Stated First Printing (first Grove Press printing). Translated from the Danish by Halberg Hallmundsson. Good in good dust jacket. Yellow cloth covered boards have light bumping and scuffing to edges. Binding tight. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and tears and creasing along edges. Light overall scuffing, aging and soiling to jacket as well. NOT price clipped Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From jacket flaps] Gitte, the young protagonist of this sparely written, documentary novel of the Lesbian way of life, is caught up in an agonizing round of squalor, degradation, hospitalization, and "freedom" - which means return to the hard-boiled milieu of Copenhagen bars. She is at constant war with her environment, rebelling against its mores not out of a perverse misanthropy, but because she seeks a love and peace which are considered sick and neurotic. During her first stay in the hospital, following a suicide attempt, she meets a young woman with whom she falls hopelessly in love. The affair is continued after their release, but it is tremendously destructive to Gitte, since her lover has long been trapped in the barren cycle of "kicks," drinking, and unsatisfying promiscuity which comprise the underground world of the Lesbian. With a kind of candid self-pity which fits the narrator's youth and inexperience, Anything Goes is a poignant comment on a society which condemns, or at best ignores, the needs of a large segment of its people who wish simply to live their lives in the open, without being thought of as unbalanced individuals or freaks.