Selfies - Couverture souple

Weil, Sylvie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1999331826 ISBN 13 : 9781999331825

Editeur : Les Fugitives, 2019

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

A new genre is born: the short selfie collection! Lively, inventive, compassionate, aching, morally complex and troubling, I loved these self-portraits more than anything I ve read lately. --Lauren Elkin

A beguiling series of vignettes, by turns wry, amusing and disturbing, inspired by self-portraits by women artists and reflecting on the images they provoke. An illuminating survey of the author's various identities, in a fractured world, as mother, lover and writer. --Michèle Roberts

In Selfies, Sylvie Weil has created a formula for thinking about her life in a stylized, ironic way that armours a moving honesty. Each chapter contains the description of a female artist s self-portrait; the description of an imaginary self-portrait by the author that riffs on what went before; and a little autobiographical story, at crooked angles to both. The title itself is tongue-in-cheek, for nothing could be further from the obsessive present of the selfie than these fragments steeped in both memory and knowledge of what is to come. In Ros Schwartz's nimble translation Weil reasserts the value of the word against the current tyranny of images. There are no pictures of the pictures. Her musings and memories skirt dark spectres with jaunty charm. Illusions and expectations are brightly flagged and duly punctured: she exposes the cheapness of people at a book signing, the sentimental hypocrisy of an old friend of her mother's. On a visit to her son's family ('Self-portrait with portrait of my son') she endures their deadly normality, making strenuous jokes. 'Josefina s laugh is more of a guffaw. She retorts: 'You're too much! Always saying something funny!' Weil plays along through gritted teeth, hoping only to grab a photograph of her son without the others. Final success explains the self- portrait she'd imagined for us earlier, which would show her in the car ready to leave, contemplating the camera screen and wearing an indefinable smile ... without real joy, but triumphant .The original self-portrait-with-portrait was a Venetian painting from 1715, in which the artist holds a likeness not of her child, but of her sister, rendered in what Weil finds to be a 'somewhat mawkish' way. The elements of Weil's three-stroke episodes never quite match up, refracting rather than mirroring, hinting at unspoken questions to self, self- image and history in a brave, original and unsettling work. --TImes Literary Supplement

Biographie de l'auteur

Sylvie Weil is the author of fiction and non-fiction works published in France and, in English translation, in the USA. The daughter of Andre Weil, one of the twentieth century's most brilliant mathematicians (and a founding member of Bourbaki) and the niece of Simone Weil, one of its most important philosophers, Sylvie was born in the United States but was raised in Paris. She now divides her time between Paris and New York City. After teaching French literature in several American universities she devoted herself to writing. Her critically acclaimed memoir 'Chez les Weil' was translated and published in several languages, in English by Northwestern University Press in 2010 (At Home with Andre and Simone'). She has published several collections of short stories and has contributed stories to literary magazines. Her fiction work for young adults has won the prestigious Prix Sorcieres in France.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Les Fugitives
• Date d'édition: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1999331826
• ISBN 13: 9781999331825
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 160