Women in Translation: Writers who should be published in the UK
Continuing our series of posts about French writers for the Women in Translation Month, this time we'll be talking about authors who actually haven't been published in the United Kingdom yet... but really should be. If you look around a little, you'll find that all four names listed in this post have in fact been translated in other European languages; what are the British waiting for?
Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam:
Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam was born and raised in Marseilles, and southern France provides the setting for a number of her novels. She has an aggrégation of modern literature, and is a founding member of the pluridisciplinary association Autres et Pareils. Bayamack-Tam has been having her novels published for 20 years now, for a total of 10 different titles. The character of Charonne is central to several of these: a beautiful and obese black woman, she was brought up by an adoptive (white) who detest her. Few people love or even like Charonne, yet she often features as a lively heroïne, lucid yet optimistic just like the books are uncompromising without being vindictive. Emanuelle Bayamack-Tam has been translated in German and Italian, and won the Prix Alexandre-Vialatte in 2013 for Si tout n’a pas péri avec mon innocence.
Bayamack-Tam herself describes her writing as “disparate”, built on successive aggregations of literary influences. Like any other novelist, she draws on the various books she has read in the past; but she references other writers (Baudelaire, Dickens) consistently, and in an upfront manner. Her protagonists are very often female, and women take centre stage in all of her novels. Issues of sexual identity, of the body of a woman, of sexual discovery are recurrent throughout Bayamack-Tam’s work. And women play a central role in the writer’s constant desire to expose the shams and hypocrisy of her characters, with Bayamack-Tam’s writing frequently taking on Molière-like undertones as she jubilantly reveals the failures of petit-bourgeois families. In her latest novel, Je Viens, the three generations of a dysfunctional family (Charonne, and her adoptive mother and grandmother) are given the role of narrator one after another, revealing the depths of their inner despair.
Olivia Rosenthal:
Olivia Rosenthal is a literature graduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She started publishing her books and essays very late in the 1990s, and then took up writing for the theatre several years later. Her novels On n’est pas là pour disparaître and Que font les rennes après Noel? won several prizes, respectively the Prix Wepler and the Prix Pierre-Simon “Ethique et reflexion”, and the Prix du Livre Inter, the Prix Alexandre-Vialatte, and the Prix Eve-Delacroix. Starting in 2005, Rosenthal has also cooperated with film directors, choreographers, and theatre directors to produce performances for various festivals (including Avignon) and venues. One of her other projects is on “architecture through words”, in which she gives life to buildings through the words of those living or working in them. Since 2009, her work has also engaged with cinema, either indirectly through her novel Ils ne sont pour rien dans mes larmes, or more directly by writing short film scripts and composing performances based on the cinema.
A distinguishing feature of Rosenthal’s writing is that she likes to weave elements of intellectual disciplines like philosophy or the sciences into her fiction books. The writer shows a real desire for going beyond “the book” as a self-contained monolith: documents, interviews, scientific reports, and witness accounts all intrude into what are often safe narrative spaces. With this in mind, Rosenthal’s willingness to explore different forms of art appears as being part of the same artistic approach as her experimental writing, rather than being a “side project”. Her novels also often address common fears and anxieties as well as the strategies we use to fight back against them and liberate ourselves.
Marie Nimier:
Marie Nimier first started out as a musician, playing in various groups and participating in stage performances. In the mid-1980s, she turned towards writing, and she has since then fully embraced a literary career. Some of her novels have won prestigious literary prizes like the Prix Max Barthou of the Académie Française for Sirène, or the Prix Médicis for La Reine du silence. Although she is nowadays mostly recognised as a novelist, Marie Nimier hasn’t forsaken her initial passion for performance and music. As well as writing theatre and radiophonic plays, musicals, film scripts and texts to be choreographed into dance shows, she has regularly collaborated with a theatre company and is part of a touring literary cabaret!
Nimier’s much-acclaimed novels touch on a wide variety of subjects, all of which are deftly explored through her refined and aesthetic prose. One can also perhaps to an underlying concern with loss, absence, and longing that runs through her work. La Reine du silence, one of her most acclaimed books, was her attempt at facing the ghostly presence of her father, the leader of the anti-Sartrian Hussards, and the man who dubbed her the “Queen of silence”. In Les Inséparables, Nimier tries to decypher the mistery that was her childhood and her “inseparable” friendship with a girl during that time. She has also shown a talent for sensual writing, displayed in her latest novel La Plage, in which Nimier explores the transformative power of encounters, making it an initiatic novel of some sorts.