Women In Translation: French writers to look out for in 2016-17
August is this year’s women in translation month, and so it’s the perfect opportunity to showcase the many French women who are excellent writers. The last post was a short list of some of the standout books that have been translated in English, while this one will try to draw attention to other authors who have been or will be published in the UK this year. In the next couple of weeks we will also be talking about women who really should be being translated but haven’t been yet, and French female children’s writers starting to make themselves known in Britain.
Ananda Devi:
Ananda Devi was born in Mauritius, an island inhabited by people of Indian descent, Creoles, Sino-Mauritians, and descendants of French and British settlers. She had her first short stories published when she was 19 years old, but didn’t immediately pursue writing as her profession, receiving a doctorate in social anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Since then she has returned to writing and has become one of the leading writers hailing from the Indian Ocean.
In her interviews, Devi often her shares her fascination with the Indian culture which her parents transmitted to her. At the same time, however, she insists on the fact that her own identity, and all identities in general, are the opposite of fixed attachments to a monolithic object. Identity is “an exploration of all the possibilities of being”, and in their multiplicity they are “soluble in one another”; words and phrases drawn from Hindi and Creole mingle with her French prose. Devi’s characters are often being riven by destructive boundaries between the rest of the world and themselves, whether these have been self-constructed or imposed from the outside. In Indian Tango, an infatuated foreign writer tries to access the soul of a woman who fascinates him, for it lies hidden behind the seclusion of centuries old tradition. Eve out of her Ruins, to be published in September, recently won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie.
Indian Tango, translated by Jean Anderson (Host Publications)
" Indian Tango, published in French in 2007, is set in Delhi in 2004, against a background of monsoon rains and the general election that would see Sonia Gandhi briefly head a coalition government. A visiting writer becomes obsessed by Subhadra, a woman glimpsed on the street, and as this unconventional relationship develops, the cost of pursuing passion and desire in a vibrant but deeply conservative society comes into sharp focus. A sometimes bitter, always moving meditation on the limitations placed on women's (and others') lives by convention builds inexorably to a powerful and stunning conclusion. "
Eve out of her Ruins, translated by Jeffrey Zuckermann (Les Fugitives/CB Editions)
"Eve out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, and a poignant exploration of lives at the margins of society. Published in the UK for the first time, this celebrated novel won the 2006 Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie."
Marie Darrieussecq:
Darrieussecq’s passion for literature is a lifelong one, and she claims that she was already intent on becoming a writer when she was only 6 years old; she also won the Prix des jeunes écrivains awarded by Le Monde just before turning twenty. During her time studying at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she was especially attracted to the critical theory of Barthes and writers such as Guibert and Perec. At one point she also took the time to educate herself in psychoanalysis, which she credits as a liberating influence on her.
Her novels all feature female protagonists; themes such as identity and belonging, disappearance and absence, and the blurry boundary between the physical and the psychological are present throughout her work. The traumatic transformation of bodies is a also recurring feature of her novels: Pig Tales presented the story of a woman transformed into a sow. It was also Darrieussecq’s first published novel, and instantly achieved both commercial and critical success. Most of her novels have since been translated in English and published in the UK (by Faber&Faber, and by Text Publishing for the most recent ones). Her latest book Men won the Prix Médicis.
Pig Tales, translated by Linda Coverdale (Faber & Faber)
"Pig Tales is a brilliant satirical novel about a stunning young woman working in a beauty 'massage' parlour. She enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses - into a pig.
Rejected by her boyfriend, left to wander the sewers and forage for food in public parks, she takes up with a werewolf with insatiable appetites. They share everything (pizza is a particular favourite; she gets the pizza, he gets the delivery boy) until someone alerts the authorities and tragedy strikes . . . Gender, politics and social hypocrisy all come under scrutiny in this entertaining and enlightening novel. Pig Tales is a Metamorphosis for the present day, a dark fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul."
Men, translated by Penny Hueston (Text Publishing)
"The French title of Men plays on a quote by Marguerite Duras: We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot in order to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible, we couldn’t bear them.‘
With her characteristic intensity, edginess and humour, Marie Darrieussecq explores female desire, what it means to be a woman. Solange was a provincial teenager in All the Way; now in her thirties, she’s not a great mother, is a mediocre actress, but in Hollywood she falls for a charismatic actor, Kouhouesso, who wants to direct a movie of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—in Africa. He’s black; she’s white—what’s the difference when it comes to love, she wonders?
Solange follows her man to Africa, determined to play a main role in both his film and his affections. But nothing goes to plan in this brilliantly droll examination of romance, movie-making and clichés about race relations. After all, there’s no guarantee you’ll be loved by the one you love.Personal and political, passionate and engaged, Men is a novel that will make you see things differently. "
Natalie Léger:
Léger is currently the director of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, an institution set up for academics and professionals which gathers archival material and studies on the major French publishing houses. She has curated several exhibitions on writers and writing: notably, exhibitions on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett at the Centres Georges Pompidou. In terms of publishing, she was the editor of Antoine Vitez’s 5-volume Ecrits sur le Theatre, as well as having annotated and collected Barthes’ last lectures at the Collège de France.
Suite for Barbara Loden, published in 2015, is an attempt at shedding light on the pin-up-turned-filmmaker’s life through Wanda, the anti-Bonnie and Clyde that was the subject of her only movie. The narrator is supposed to research Barbara Loden and Wanda, but is confronted with the inadequacy of words when it comes to putting a life to paper. L’exposition, which is due to be published next year in translation, is centred on the Countess of Castiglione, a pioneering photography amateur of the mid-nineteenth century (and the most famous of Napoleon III’s many mistresses). A successful novelist and an erudite writer when it comes to literature, Léger’s works feature quests for the elusive truth on women’s lives and provide challenging reflection on the meaning of womanhood.
Suite for Barbara Loden, Natasha Lehrer, Cécile Menon (Les Fugitives)
"“I believe there is a miracle in Wanda,” wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. “Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated.” It is perhaps this “miracle”—the seeming collapse of fiction and fact—that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.
Moving contrapuntally between biography and autofiction, film criticism and anecdote, fact and speculation, Suite for Barbara Loden is a stunning meditation on knowledge and self-knowledge, on the surfaces of life and art, and how we come to truth—a kind of truth—not through facts alone but through acts of the imagination."
Emmanuelle Pagano:
On the face of it, Pagano’s time at her university focused more on the study of the plastic arts, especially film, than providing her with a direct link to literature. However, she published her first novel in 2002, five years after having received her aggregation and begun a career as a teacher. The breakthrough came three years later, with Le Tiroir à cheveux, a novel concerned with a single mother who lives with her mentally handicapped son - a handicap that was the consequence of her difficulties with accepting her pregnancy. In Les Adolescents Troglodytes, which won the European Union Prize for Literature, Pagano follows a truck driver, who was born a man but is now a woman.
Pagano’s style could be described as sober and lucid, eschewing flourishes so as to best impart the reader with a vivid impression of her characters’ impressions and emotions. Referring to her epistolary romance with another writer in L’Absence d’oiseaux d’eau, Pagano says she doesn’t want to write with “flowers in her hair, but rather write like one bites into a piece of meat”. The same attachment to authenticity can be seen in her book Trysting, to be published in November, which traces a myriad of couples whose love is physically tied together by objects, deeds, and places.
Trysting, translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis (And Other Stories)
"Grains of sand, bridges, shampoo, a bike, board games, yoga, sellotape, birds, balloons, tattoos, wandering hands, tweezers, maths, fish, letterboxes, puppets, a vacuum cleaner, a ball of string – and love.
In this fiction of yous and mes, of hims and hers, Pagano choreographs the objects, gestures, places, and persons through which love is made real."
Marie-Sabine Roger:
Marie-Sabine Roger has been continuously writing books for almost thirty years now. During much of that time she only published children’s books (over a hundred titles), but since 2001 she has also regularly written novels for grown-ups. Of her adult literature, it can be said that she has a knack for taking familiar -almost clichéd- plots and characters and creating well-written and genuinely humane stories about them; her writing is candid but not naive.
This year, her novel Soft in the head will be published by the independent publishers Pushkin press. It is a deceptively typical-looking Bildungsroman about Germain, a kind-hearted illiterate man in his mid-40s who strikes a friendship with a thoroughly cultured elderly woman. Out of this unlikely relationship, a nurturing bond is born, fostering Germain’s love for literature.
Soft in the head, translated by Frank Wynne (Pushkin Press)
"His mother called him a worthless halfwit while his fellow drunks at the local bar ensure he's the butt of all their jokes. He spends his days whittling wood, counting pigeons and adding his own name to the bottom of the list on the town war memorial. So how could Germain possibly understand what a casual encounter on a park bench with eighty-five year old Margueritte could mean?
In this touchingly comic tale of an unusual friendship, that first conversation opens a door into a world Germain could never have imagined-the world of books and ideas-and gives both him and Margueritte a chance at a happiness they thought had passed them by."