Suite for Barbara Loden - Couverture souple

Leger, Nathalie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0993009301 ISBN 13 : 9780993009303

Editeur : Les Fugitives, 2015

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

'It takes both the novel and biography to new and interesting places.' -- Eimear McBride, The Guardian Books of the Year, 2015

'Beautifully translated' -- Times Literary Supplement

'Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front. . . . In her combination of the conversational and the incantatory, the fragmentary and the infinite, Léger captures something of [Marguerite] Duras s own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of Wanda are entirely her own.'
-- The New Yorker

'...one more addition to a growing group of books that sit somewhere between poetry, fiction, and expansive non-fiction: Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Michael Kimball's Galaga, Kier-La Janisse's House Of Psychotic Women, Geoff Dyer's Zona all come to mind reading Suite For Barbara Loden.'
-- City Paper (Baltimore)

'A little gem (...) a powerful example of how summary, channeled through the most personal of perspectives, can be a form of art.'
-- Harper's Magazine

'One of my favorite pieces, a multigenre portrait of Léger, Loden, and Wanda (the titular subject of Loden s 1970 film, which Loden wrote and directed and in which she stars). Léger sets out to write a short notice of Loden for an encyclopedia but quickly becomes mired in the task. How do you describe a person you don t know? What constitutes their essentialness? And how do you tell their story simply? Since closing our Winter issue last week, I ve taken up the rest of the book, and I ve found it to be one of the most affecting stories I ve read in a long time. A mix of observation, recitation, and imagination, Suite persists in the idea that no single perspective is sufficient in gaining an understanding of a person, and also, perhaps, that no accumulation of perspectives is sufficient either.'
-- The Paris Review Staff Pick

'There s a kind of inert vividness to these descriptions, a scrim between me and the dramatic moment, that I find almost erotic. Léger intersperses descriptions of Wanda with passages about how she came to know this movie, how she tried and tried to understand Barbara Loden herself. Woven into these, too, are autobiographical asides. One begins: Once upon a time the man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men. The result of these combined fragments is delicious and mysterious.'
-- Edan Lepucki, author of The Millions, A Year in Reading 2016

'In hugely reductive terms, this is Geoff Dyer's Zona meets Chris Kraus's I Love Dick: an open and intelligent piece of art criticism drifts into broader critique of social and cultural issues, and is honest about the fact that it can t do any of these without also being autobiographical. That it is published in a beautiful edition that gives a boutique twist on the classic French livre de poche style, by a brand new British publisher proudly asserting their ownership of an important but overlooked niche, only adds to the charm. Book of the year.'
-- Jonathan Gibbs

'Brilliant little book' -- Valeria Luiselli

'An extraordinary book. It reads compulsively and is unlike anything else I have read.' --Selma Dabbagh

Immensely readable, extremely thought-provoking and really quite haunting [...] And best of all, it achieves that most elusive feat of never reading like a translation. -- Lydia Syson

It is a real gem of a piece of writing. Highly original and very powerful. -- Jenny McPhee

Léger jump-cuts through time and space with the expertise of a movie director -- Joanna Walsh

'A truly remarkable book. I love Leger's obsessive circling, the connections she draws in and through the Loden/Wanda narrative, some deeply haunting images ...
-- Anna Zalakostas (Green Apple Books, San Francisco)

'This beautiful book is striking for its echoes of artists who are either quoted or (never gratuitously) emulated, including Godard, Fred Wiseman, Sebald and Perec.
-- La Quinzaine littéraire

'A moving, subtle novel about the need to create
--Le Monde

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation 2016

First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden. Loden s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinéma vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook.

How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer s evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator s rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Les Fugitives
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0993009301
• ISBN 13: 9780993009303
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 128