Lucien d'Azay: À la recherche de Sunsiaré : Une vie (2005)

In some respects Lucien d'Azay's À la recherche de Sunsiaré resembles Didier Blonde's books: recovering people from oblivion by detective work. Certainly Blonde's Leïlah Mahi 1932 (2015) is called to mind: a strikingly attractive young woman about whom very little is known. This applied to Sunsiaré de Larcône, who died in a car crash in 1962, which took the famous and highly noted 'Hussard' Roger Nimier with her. She had just published her first novel, La Messagère, which she saw as just a 'trigger' for what she was due to bring to the literary world. Obviously her ambitions were killed along with her, but just who was she? In a detective story which resembles a biography but also (unlike Blonde's investigations) contains autobiographical elements, D'Azay tries to find the answers.

Sunsiaré was born in Rambertvillers (Vosges) modestly, as Suzy Durupt, to a car mechanic father and a mother who was a hairdresser, although her mother remarried the pied-noir Diego Larcone (without circumflex), a soldier in 1947. Suzy was brought up by her paternal grandparents, who had a restaurant in Rambertvillers. Suzy left school at the age of 14. 

D'Azay's account is fascinating, containing as it does many first-hand accounts of who Sunsiaré was, her change of name (to go with her change of image ), plus many letters to add to our knowledge of her. Sunsiaré was what we might describe as an intellectual groupie, but she was a force to be reckoned with. She had many conversations and correspondences with literary figures, such as Julien Gracq (whose Château d'Argol and La Rivage des Syrtes influenced her a great deal), and other friends of hers included Guy Dupré and Raymond Abellio. This book is not much light to 400 pages, and is surely without question the definitive work on this obscure and entrancing individual.

Sunsiaré, Columbarium, Père-Lachaise, Paris 20e.