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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : D : Darrieussecq, Marie
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Franz Kafka meets George Orwell in this dark, dystopian tale. Set in Paris in the near future, the story revolves around a young woman who works as a beautician and masseuse, and for whom happiness is derived from perfumes, shampoos and generally hedonistic pursuits. One day she realizes she is slowly (and quite literally) becoming a pig. Life as a neophyte porker, she discovers, isn't all that bad, though it does contain some unique dangers. She remains extremely popular with her massage customers, who take unusual glee in adopting her barnyard ways. Unfortunately, it is difficult for a pig to find true love in a human world; abandoned by her lover, her days blur into an endless stream of swine-like debauchery. Then she meets Yvan, a young corporate type who sometimes becomes a wolf.Pig Tales, a Prix Goncourt finalist and overnight sensation in France, is Marie Darrieussecq's first book.
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Franz Kafka meets George Orwell in this dark, dystopian tale. Set in Paris in the near future, the story revolves around a young woman who works as a beautician and masseuse, and for whom happiness is derived from perfumes, shampoos and generally hedonistic pursuits. One day she realizes she is slowly (and quite literally) becoming a pig. Life as a neophyte porker, she discovers, isn't all that bad, though it does contain some unique dangers. She remains extremely popular with her massage customers, who take unusual glee in adopting her barnyard ways. Unfortunately, it is difficult for a pig to find true love in a human world; abandoned by her lover, her days blur into an endless stream of swine-like debauchery. Then she meets Yvan, a young corporate type who sometimes becomes a wolf.Pig Tales, a Prix Goncourt finalist and overnight sensation in France, is Marie Darrieussecq's first book.
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What goes through your mind, how do you begin to make sense of things, when your husband goes out for a few minutes to buy bread--and never returns? Marie Darrieussecq's first novel, translated as Pig Tales and a huge bestseller in her native France, was a surreal account of a woman slowly being transformed into a sow. Her new book details the inner transformations undergone by a woman unaccountably left by her husband: what both novels share is an acute sense of the place of women in modern society while remaining fastidiously accurate to the sensibilities of their protagonists. Both novels ask questions about the degree to which identity is grounded in the perception of others, in the mirrored symbiosis of relationships.What really sets Darrieussecq apart from many other writers is her attention to language--although My Phantom Husband is a short book, it invites considered reading--the closely focused prose allows the reader to track the micro-climates of anxiety, fear, listlessness, shock, hallucination and despair (not to mention inadvertent humour) as they affect the mind of the narrator. Darrieussecq renders unsparingly the meandering shifts and bifurcations of the traumatised self: like the edges of fractal curves, thoughts spool and fracture outwards or converge on some strange attractor--everything is in the emotional detail, the tidal oscillation between hyper-sensitised and desensitised states.
Echoing the previous book, there is a hint of surreality here: the undefined location of the book is some curiously hybrid postcolonial landscape and Darrieussecq subtly sets up reverberations between inner mental terrain and outward place, hinting at other possible readings of the book's psychic drama. Finally though it is the immediate impression that is so affecting in what is, quite simply, an extraordinary and powerful study of loss. --Burhan Tufail
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What goes through your mind, how do you begin to make sense of things, when your husband goes out for a few minutes to buy bread--and never returns? Marie Darrieussecq's first novel, translated as Pig Tales and a huge bestseller in her native France, was a surreal account of a woman slowly being transformed into a sow. Her new book details the inner transformations undergone by a woman unaccountably left by her husband: what both novels share is an acute sense of the place of women in modern society while remaining fastidiously accurate to the sensibilities of their protagonists. Both novels ask questions about the degree to which identity is grounded in the perception of others, in the mirrored symbiosis of relationships.What really sets Darrieussecq apart from many other writers is her attention to language--although My Phantom Husband is a short book, it invites considered reading--the closely focused prose allows the reader to track the micro-climates of anxiety, fear, listlessness, shock, hallucination and despair (not to mention inadvertent humour) as they affect the mind of the narrator. Darrieussecq renders unsparingly the meandering shifts and bifurcations of the traumatised self: like the edges of fractal curves, thoughts spool and fracture outwards or converge on some strange attractor--everything is in the emotional detail, the tidal oscillation between hyper-sensitised and desensitised states.
Echoing the previous book, there is a hint of surreality here: the undefined location of the book is some curiously hybrid postcolonial landscape and Darrieussecq subtly sets up reverberations between inner mental terrain and outward place, hinting at other possible readings of the book's psychic drama. Finally though it is the immediate impression that is so affecting in what is, quite simply, an extraordinary and powerful study of loss. --Burhan Tufail
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Marie Darrieussecq's unique and beautiful book Breathing Underwater is a breathtaking display by a young novelist whose previous two works had already marked her out as a serious and sensual writer of some power. Pig Tales was the enormously successful story of a woman's transformation into a sow, a bizarre but telling fairy tale that spoke intelligently about gender, identity, sexuality and change. Phantom Husband was a compelling and disturbing drama: a woman's husband disappears one day, no word, no reason why. How, in such a position of absence, without the fact of loss, does one carry on and cope? And what does grieving mean without its object? Breathing Underwater, despite its apparent slightness, builds on and further investigates these themes and is an absolute triumph.The main voice in the book, an unnamed young mother, walks out on her husband and her life (a situation that is almost the direct inversion of that in Phantom Husband). She takes herself and her daughter to the seaside. She escapes, although we don't really know what from. And in the most fluid, elegant, unhurried, aqueous prose-poetry she, her mother and her daughter are all seen succumbing, surviving and changing. Darrieussecq bravely eschews any temptation to psychoanalyse her characters or to moralise about them. We, as readers, are simply invited to observe. And despite the heat-haze, the blinding brightness of the sun, the enervating heat, what we observe are the slow, languid transformations that the coast evokes. There is a sensuality somehow embedded in this writing and a wonderful intelligence. Breathing Underwater almost defies description: limpid but with a compelling ambiguity, often it is only toward the end of an often long paragraph that we know who has spoken; enigmatic and allusive but also lucid, simple and direct. This is writing of the highest standard but, more importantly perhaps, a lovely, very affecting, lambent treat of a novel. Mark Thwaite
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Marie Darrieussecq's unique and beautiful book Breathing Underwater is a breathtaking display by a young novelist whose previous two works had already marked her out as a serious and sensual writer of some power. Pig Tales was the enormously successful story of a woman's transformation into a sow, a bizarre but telling fairy tale that spoke intelligently about gender, identity, sexuality and change. Phantom Husband was a compelling and disturbing drama: a woman's husband disappears one day, no word, no reason why. How, in such a position of absence, without the fact of loss, does one carry on and cope? And what does grieving mean without its object? Breathing Underwater, despite its apparent slightness, builds on and further investigates these themes and is an absolute triumph.The main voice in the book, an unnamed young mother, walks out on her husband and her life (a situation that is almost the direct inversion of that in Phantom Husband). She takes herself and her daughter to the seaside. She escapes, although we don't really know what from. And in the most fluid, elegant, unhurried, aqueous prose-poetry she, her mother and her daughter are all seen succumbing, surviving and changing. Darrieussecq bravely eschews any temptation to psychoanalyse her characters or to moralise about them. We, as readers, are simply invited to observe. And despite the heat-haze, the blinding brightness of the sun, the enervating heat, what we observe are the slow, languid transformations that the coast evokes. There is a sensuality somehow embedded in this writing and a wonderful intelligence. Breathing Underwater almost defies description: limpid but with a compelling ambiguity, often it is only toward the end of an often long paragraph that we know who has spoken; enigmatic and allusive but also lucid, simple and direct. This is writing of the highest standard but, more importantly perhaps, a lovely, very affecting, lambent treat of a novel. Mark Thwaite
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Marie Darrieussecq's mesmerising novel A Brief Stay with the Living continues her concern with deciphering, understanding and writing loss. In her previous two novels (My Phantom Husband and Breathing Underwater) Darrieussecq had carefully and beautifully drawn the disorientating effect of being left or leaving; of grief without mourning (concerns about the presence of absence being so much a fixation with Lacanians such as Darian Leader, to whom, among others, she dedicates her book). And in Brief Stay, a novel narrated by four voices (a mother and her three daughters), she further investigates her theme by deepening it; here each character is trying separately to cope with the death of son/brother Pierre.A writer of considerable talents with a love of wordplay and allusion, Darrieussecq's prose-poetry will not be to everyone's tastes. The book is a tad ostentatious, told in a dense, discordant, sometimes self-indulgent stream of consciousness, often seeming confused and certainly confusing; the characterisation paltry, the focus uneven, but the attempt is brave, the writing vivid, the voice intelligent and the book, while exacting, ultimately prepossessing and entrancing. Marie Darrieussecq continues to grow into an important writer worth reading and discussing. --Mark Thwaite
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Marie Darrieussecq's mesmerising novel A Brief Stay with the Living continues her concern with deciphering, understanding and writing loss. In her previous two novels (My Phantom Husband and Breathing Underwater) Darrieussecq had carefully and beautifully drawn the disorientating effect of being left or leaving; of grief without mourning (concerns about the presence of absence being so much a fixation with Lacanians such as Darian Leader, to whom, among others, she dedicates her book). And in Brief Stay, a novel narrated by four voices (a mother and her three daughters), she further investigates her theme by deepening it; here each character is trying separately to cope with the death of son/brother Pierre.A writer of considerable talents with a love of wordplay and allusion, Darrieussecq's prose-poetry will not be to everyone's tastes. The book is a tad ostentatious, told in a dense, discordant, sometimes self-indulgent stream of consciousness, often seeming confused and certainly confusing; the characterisation paltry, the focus uneven, but the attempt is brave, the writing vivid, the voice intelligent and the book, while exacting, ultimately prepossessing and entrancing. Marie Darrieussecq continues to grow into an important writer worth reading and discussing. --Mark Thwaite
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Franz Kafka meets George Orwell in this dark, dystopian tale. Set in Paris in the near future, the story revolves around a young woman who works as a beautician and masseuse, and for whom happiness is derived from perfumes, shampoos and generally hedonistic pursuits. One day she realizes she is slowly (and quite literally) becoming a pig. Life as a neophyte porker, she discovers, isn't all that bad, though it does contain some unique dangers. She remains extremely popular with her massage customers, who take unusual glee in adopting her barnyard ways. Unfortunately, it is difficult for a pig to find true love in a human world; abandoned by her lover, her days blur into an endless stream of swine-like debauchery. Then she meets Yvan, a young corporate type who sometimes becomes a wolf.Pig Tales, a Prix Goncourt finalist and overnight sensation in France, is Marie Darrieussecq's first book.
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Franz Kafka meets George Orwell in this dark, dystopian tale. Set in Paris in the near future, the story revolves around a young woman who works as a beautician and masseuse, and for whom happiness is derived from perfumes, shampoos and generally hedonistic pursuits. One day she realizes she is slowly (and quite literally) becoming a pig. Life as a neophyte porker, she discovers, isn't all that bad, though it does contain some unique dangers. She remains extremely popular with her massage customers, who take unusual glee in adopting her barnyard ways. Unfortunately, it is difficult for a pig to find true love in a human world; abandoned by her lover, her days blur into an endless stream of swine-like debauchery. Then she meets Yvan, a young corporate type who sometimes becomes a wolf.Pig Tales, a Prix Goncourt finalist and overnight sensation in France, is Marie Darrieussecq's first book.
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