Nathalie Léger is the award-winning author of Suite for
Barbara Loden and The White Dress, as well as an editor and
archivist. She has curated exhibitions on Roland Barthes and Samuel
Beckett for the Centre Pompidou, and is Director of the Institut
Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, an organization dedicated to
preserving the archives of modern French writers.
Natasha Lehrer is an award-winning writer and literary
translator. She has written features and book reviews for a variety
of newspapers, including The Guardian, The Times Literary
Supplement, and The Observer.
Cécile Menon is a translator between French and English and
the founder of the London-based publisher Les Fugitives.
“With mirrors and lenses, with echoes and silences, Léger’s books
suggest that we may write and perform the stories of our lives, but
our roles have also been written for us, and have already been
performed by other women, whose experiences we may recognize as our
own. In the end, the most original performance here is Léger’s,
and it is undeniably virtuosic.” —Eula Biss, The New Yorker
“In Léger’s hands, desolation can reveal a woman in all her
multiplicity—in her ugliness and abasement and determined
self-destruction, seemingly ground down to the nubs of her sorrow,
but ultimately emerging with a strange richness, full of haunted
persistence, droll knowingness, untamed desires, and hardscrabble
resilience.” —Leslie Jamison, Bookforum
“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.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Assigned to write the entry about Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden's
art-house movie, for a film encyclopedia, Léger let herself get
lost. The result gracefully melds criticism, fiction, and
autobiography, and is a powerful example of how summary, channeled
through the most personal of perspectives, can be a form of art.”
—Christine Smallwood, Harper's
“Inventive and affecting, it takes both the novel and the biography
to new and interesting places.” —Eimear McBride
“Brilliant little book.” —Valeria Luiselli
“Léger’s vigorous work consistently satisfies, with ideas
crystallizing with the clarity of a photograph.” —Publishers
Weekly
“I’ve just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger,
translated by Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two
forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White
Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by
Amanda Demarco. All three defy categorisation—history, essay,
memoir, fiction. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works
very much.” —Catherine Lacey
“This trilogy feels more than a feminist recovery of narrative: it
is a method through which the lives of women artists are reimagined
and remade through the writer herself, a mode of hospitality in
which lives coalesce and transform one another.” —Katie Da Cunha
Lewin, The White Review
“Highbrow but highly readable.” —ELLE (France)
“The word triptych, not trilogy. Because the books are not a
straight line. The books scoff at straight lines, reveal how any
line can look straight if you’re zoomed too far in. The books are
not discrete episodes, they are all one thing, they are all one
project.” —Kyle Williams, Full Stop
“With ferocity and pathos, Léger enters into a standing-with
relationship with these other women only to realize she’s been in
touch with herself the entire time. This feels to me like the
natural movement of the most revelatory art criticism—to move close
to the work, to ride along then pierce the work’s textured surface
into its mysterious netherworld then looping back out (through
innards) towards these words you hear out there in the private
distance only to find them coming from your own mouth. With all of
these women—Countess of Castiglione, Barbara Loden and Wanda (and
Alma H. Malone), and Pippa Bacca—Léger comes to know them as women
who lived rich lives, artists’ lives, intensely felt.” —Jay
Ponteri, Essay Daily
“The suffocating interpolations of being a woman have concealed the
words of so many: Pippa Bacca, whose seemingly naive project is now
bound to her rape and murder; American actor and director Barbara
Loden, whose project of semi-autobiographical film Wanda details
the listlessness of life for the 1970s American housewife; The
Countess of Castiglione, whose hope had been to exhibit her photos
at the upcoming 1900 International Exposition; and Léger’s own
mother, whose words ‘too have been hidden away.’ The triptych not
only unearths the lost narratives of noted women; but more
significantly the writers’ reckoning with her own mother—’I never
helped her, I never stood up for her’—suggests that the triptych’s
aim is to give voice to one woman: her mother.” —Clancey D’Isa,
Chicago Review of Books
“Now that all three books exist in English thanks to Dorothy
Project and exceptional translations by Natasha Lehrer and Amanda
DeMarco, it feels as if the stakes have been tripled. Though each
book is a case study of a particular woman’s life, the neat
boundaries of these subjects aren’t meant to hold. ‘On the winding
path of femininity,’ Léger writes, ‘the loose stone you stumble
over is another woman.’ These slippages are part of the danger and
excitement of Léger’s work—look long enough at another woman, and
you may find yourself looking in a mirror.” —Laura Marris, On the
Seawall
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