Marie Darrieussecq

A young woman who lands a position at a beauty parlor enjoys great success until she slowly metamorphoses into a pig

A Novel of Lust and Transformation

Pig Tales

Penny Hueston

Sleepless

In the near future, a woman is writing in the depths of a forest. She’s cold. Her body is falling apart, as is the world around her. She’s lost the use of one eye; she’s down to one kidney, one lung. Before, in the city, she was a psychotherapist, treating patients who had suffered trauma, in particular a man, “the clicker”. Every two weeks, she travelled out to the Rest Centre, to visit her “half”, Marie, her spitting image, who lay in an induced coma, her body parts available whenever the woman needed them. As a form of resistance against the terror in the city, the woman flees, along with other fugitives and their halves. But life in the forest is disturbing too—the reanimated halves are behaving like uninhibited adolescents. And when she sees a shocking image of herself on video, are her worst fears confirmed? Our Life in the Forest, written in her inimitable concise, vivid prose recalls Darrieusecq’s brilliant debut, Pig Tales. A dystopian tale in the vein of Never Let Me Go, this is a clever novel of chilling suspense that challenges our ideas about the future, about organ-trafficking, about identity, clones, and the place of the individual in a surveillance state.

Our Life in the Forest

The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t. What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than twenty years later. In Sleepless, she recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, mostly writers, some of whom claim a connection between insomnia and creativity. With her inimitable humour, she describes her countless attempts to find a remedy, including consulting a somnologist. Darrieussecq discusses bedrooms, beds, the homeless, refugees, trauma, our wakefulness online, and how our relationship with animals is connected to whether we can sleep. Sleepless will awaken you to the otherness of our world. Insomnia feeds off this bewildering feeling: there is something else.

A Memoir of Insomnia

roman

Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes

Paula Modersohn-Becker voulait peindre et c'est tout. Elle était amie avec Rilke. Elle n'aimait pas tellement être mariée. Elle aimait le riz au lait, la compote de pommes, marcher dans la lande, Gauguin, Cézanne, les bains de mer, être nue au soleil, lire plutôt que gagner sa vie, et Paris. Elle voulait peut-être un enfant - sur ce point ses journaux et ses lettres sont ambigus. Elle a existé en vrai, de 1876 à 1907.

Vie de Paula M. Becker

Etre ici est une splendeur

First published in France in 2016, Being Here Is So Much traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876--1907). In a brief career, cut short by her death from an embolism at the age of thirty-one, shortly after she gave birth to a child, Modersohn-Becker trained in Germany, traveled often to Paris, developed close friendships with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and became one of her generation's preeminent artists, helping introduce modernity to the twentieth century alongside such other painters as Picasso and Matisse. Marie Darrieussecq's triumphant and illuminating biography at once revives Modersohn-Becker's reputation as a significant figure in modernism and sheds light on the extreme difficulty women have faced in attaining recognition and establishing artistic careers.

The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

Being Here Is Everything

Świństwo (Truizmy)

Troismi

Een vrouw tracht de dood van haar vierjarig zoontje te verwerken.

Tom is dood

A bizarre tale encompassing feminism, politics and social hypocrisy. A stunning young woman employed in the sex industry 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.

Catherine Millet

Madeleine Chapsal

Carole Bouquet

Divided by theme into chapters, this light-hearted and nostalgic romp through 20th-century Paris creates a beautiful history of the world’s most romantic city and its exceptional women. This collection of one hundred and thirty duotone photographs captures the essence of the Parisian femme fatale. All of the great French photographers from the late 1930s through the 1960s are featured, including Robert Doisneau, Brassaï, Willy Ronis, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Edouard Boubat, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Sabine Weiss, and many more. The photographs reveal Parisian women and all of their glorious facets: from the love-struck waif strolling along the banks of the Seine to the belles of the neighborhood balls flushed from their raucous dance moves, from no-nonsense career girls to flirty neighbors. Chanel-clad locals and runway models alike showcase the glamour of the fashion and haute-couture world with inimitable style. One chapter pays homage to the courageous women who battled for justice in World War II, the Resistance, the Liberation, and the revolts of May 1968, including role models such as philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir and journalist and playwright Marguerite Dumas. The Parisiennes featured here go to work, ride bikes, pose seductively, smile coyly, and are all devastatingly irresistible.

A Celebration of French Women

Parisiennes

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.

A woman walks out on her life, taking only her young daughter. She drives down to the seaside and they spend the first night camping out on the beach. They then settle in a small town and make new friends, but one is a private investigator.

Breathing Underwater

Le directeur a été très gentil avec moi le jour de mon embauche. J'ai eu la permission de gérer ma parfumerie toute seule. Ca marchait bien. Seulement, quand les premiers symptômes sont apparus, j'ai dû quitter la parfumerie. Ce n'était pas une histoire de décence ni rien ; c'est juste que tout devenait trop compliqué. Heureusement, j'ai rencontré Edgar, et Edgar, comme vous le savez, est devenu président de la République. C'était moi, l'égérie d'Edgar. Mais personne ne m'a reconnue. J'avais trop changé. Est-ce que j'avais raté la chance de ma vie ? En tout cas, je ne comprenais toujours pas très bien ce qui m'arrivait. C'était surtout ce bleu sous le sein droit qui m'inquiétait...

Truismes

A renowned French author asks fundamental questions about motherhood, gender roles and identity. A must read for fans of Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson

The Baby

Qu'est-ce qu'un bébé ? Pourquoi si peu de bébés dans la littérature ? Que faire des discours qui les entourent ? Pourquoi dit-on "bébé" et pas "le bébé" ? Qu'est-ce qu'une mère ? Et pourquoi les femmes plutôt que les hommes ?

Le bébé

"Une femme rencontre un homme. Coup de foudre. L'homme est noir, la femme est blanche. Et alors ?".

• An unconventional biography of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker by one of France's most acclaimed literary talents • Once overlooked by art historians, Modersohn-Becker was a bold and remarkable woman who challenged conventions both at home and in her art • In her characteristically elliptical, probing prose, Darrieussecq depicts a vivid portrait of Paula as a young woman and artist, her troubled marriage, ongoing struggles with poverty, the sense of conflict she felt between creativity and motherhood, and her tragic death at 31, just days after giving birth • Modersohn-Becker wrote hundreds of letters and maintained a diary throughout her short lifetime and Darrieussecq imbues Being Here with direct quotations from Paula's own writings • Today, Modersohn-Becker is widely recognised as the first female painter to paint female nudes, while she and fellow artists Picasso and Matisse are credited as having introduced the world to modernism in the early twentieth century • ‘Marie Darrieussecq reads the testament of Modersohn-Becker—the letters, the diaries, and above all the paintings—with a burning intelligence and a fierce hold on what it meant and means to be a woman and an artist.’ J. M. Coetzee

Being Here

Solange se demande s'il vaut mieux le faire avec celui-ci ou avec celui-là.

Marie Darrieussecq

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