Marie Darrieussecq Web Site

MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

NOVELS



Pig Tales, 1996
     Not easy writing your story when you live in a pigsty, and, what's more, when you've become a sow. Such is the extraordinary adventure of the female narrator of this bitingly sensual fable, who undergoes this transformation under the stupid gaze of her boyfriend Honoré, who puts on pounds, who realizes a sudden aversion to pork products, who finds herself growing supernumerary breasts, and who finishes, without choice, by leaving her job at the perfume store where she is a very special kind of hostess… Sometimes human, sometimes animal she ends up rummaging in the gutters and the public gardens where she finds vegetable garbage to eat; she gives birth to piglets; she becomes the spokesperson for the future president of France before becoming the mistress of a very seductive wolf who eats pizza delivery men, and she almost ends her life on the plate of her own mother.
     Behind these porcine adventures a society is portrayed that appears obsessed with healthy living but which is actually corrupt, that is a vast animal farm where purchases are paid for with the Euro or the Internet Card, where charlatans and mystical nuts vie for power. The story of this transformation thus doubles as a morality play wherein one sees the intentions of social satire in the work of the imagination. Placing herself from the start under the aegis of Knut Hamsun, the narrator, devilish sow that she is, from the savagery attendant to humanity, allows the reader to reconnect with the pleasures of reading which come from afar.

P.O.L. Editor
Translated by Bruce Fickett
***



My Phantom Husband, 1998
     A seven year marriage, a husband who is big and strong, who earns the money, who tends to the chores, who gives advice, who chooses the books; in short, a husband who does everything. One evening after work he leaves their apartment to buy the bread and does not return. My Phantom Husband relates the response of his wife to this loss, initially her physical reactions, and then the mental ones. Like the heroine/narrator of Pig Tales, the protagonist of Marie Darrieussecq's second novel is poorly equipped to deal with harsh reality. But while the former is a simple young woman, not well educated and unemployed at the start of the story, the protagonist of My Phantom Husband is well educated, well read and comes from comparatively privileged surroundings. One is led to ask the question: why are these women victims? One becomes a pig, the other perhaps a madwoman. In both novels, and especially in My Phantom Husband, the mother plays an important role, and perhaps in investigating the mother/daughter relation one might find some answers to that question.
     If Pig Tales has roots in The Metamorphosis of Kafka (the mutation of course, but more importantly the attitude of the person subjected to the mutation), it is possible to read the section of My Phantom Husband when the mother and daughter are together as one reads The Judgement, where Georges Bendamann, faced with the consuming power of his father, can no longer exist. The pitiable young woman says of her mother: "At the end of an hour and a half with her I am six years old; it's easy to calculate that I would lose about a year about every five minutes, and at this rate it would be totally impossible for me to remain in her company for more than two hours without facing the prospect of annihilation or fetal senility."
     And, as with a reading of Pig Tales, this mother-daughter theme is only one among many which provide an alluring richness to the reader willing to follow the complexities of My Phantom Husband.

Bruce Fickett



***



Breathing Underwater(UK) / Undercurrents(USA), 1999
     Breathing Underwater / Undercurrents, Marie Darrieussecq's third novel, deals with the sudden disappearance of a young mother and her daughter. One day, without any known reason, this mother decides to leave Paris with her young daughter in order to go to the seashore, which turns out to be along the Basque coast in the city of Biarritz. As the author states: "She (the mother) isn't going anywhere. She's just simply fleeing. One could term this a type of depression."
     Her husband, without at all understanding the reasons behind this disappearance, hires a detective to find his daughter. After the girl is brought back to her father, the mother spends the rest of her money in order to buy a ticket to Australia where, along some distant beaches, she hopes to find some relief from her worries, a sanctuary overlooking the sea.
     Standing before the sea she's able to contemplate the nature of her existence. Consequently, the novel isn't just simply about her spontaneous decision to flee, but it also raises some very important metaphysical questions which she must ask herself: i.e. Why does she find herself there? And how does she confront her human condition? As the author describes: "The sea is calming, but it doesn't resolve anything. It's a setting for asking oneself some questions. It's very meditative."
     This is a wonderful novel which makes us consider, or reconsider, our reason for being, or even our reason for fleeing.

James Estes


***
A Brief Stay With the Living, 2001
     With her fourth novel, Bref séjour chez les vivants, Marie Darrieussecq explores innovative ideas concerning the possibility of today's novel and she creates a world in which the reader must actively participate in order to understand, perhaps in reading the novel twice, or more. The main characters of Bref séjour chez les vivants are a woman and her three daughters, but there is no dialogue in this novel, it is entirely interior monologue. This monologue is in a constant state of flux, uses more than one language, principally French, but with English and Spanish as well, songs, and childhood phrases among other elements. But why the supernatural title? In this novel, as in most of Darrieussecq's work, there is a phantom. Here it is the phantom of a boy, the younger brother of the family, who drowned at the age of three.
     The main themes of Bref séjour chez les vivants are the manner in which intelligence and memory function, the subjectivity of the perception of events, the phenomenon concerning the existence of a sixth sense, and the relations which make up a family. Without a doubt a contemporary work, Darrieussecq has written this novel, which she saw as a very difficult undertaking, with rigor, and she has succeeded.

Sarah Feeley



***
Critics on A Brief Stay With the Living, 2001
Translated from the French by Piotr Skuza

What unites phantoms, memory, and the sea? Looking for an answer, you will immerse yourself in Marie Darrieussecq’s novels, in particular in A Brief Visit With the Living, a boggling synthesis of her universe lying between the fantasy and common memory, the flux of strangeness and the reflux of the known.

The World Online // What Are/Were You Thinking About? (possible titles) 

On reading the text, the reader can restore a narrative continuity in this fragmented novel: a woman is “recruited” in order to penetrate other people’s minds. Her name is Anne. Within 24 hours, she will deliver the cerebral contents of the various members of her family. The reader is going to follow the fast and disordered movements of their thoughts, memories, phantasms, resentment, and confused hopes. This could boil down to a family story because deep inside we wind up getting to know that family: the mother, John, her first husband living in Gibraltar, Momo, her current partner, Jeanne, Anne, and Nore, her three daughters, Pierre, Jeanne’s dead husband who drowned, and Nore’s lovers. We get to know them all, but it is much more than a mere family story. It would be lacking in connections, meetings, and concrete events. The transference is no longer genealogical but fluid, telepathic. Everything happens in an alternating flux of a circulation transmitting information from one brain to another, from one consciousness to a different one, from one memory to a new memory, all this in a universe where the global brain is no longer a vain expression, where some engage in experimenting or even realizing it. “Because on the surface of the world, and probably beyond, there is only one consciousness, floating, intact, but also fractioned into individuals among whom agents are selected, particles that are intense enough to be able to penetrate the global consciousness – or, on the contrary, sufficiently forthcoming; empathetic would be the word, porous, and permeable to wander towards the unison of the great consciousness and perceive its pulsations.” The image of this brain searching for otherness and a “cockpit,” present already at the birth of phantoms, is that of a hermit crab without its old shell, looking, all stripped, for a new one. And thus functions the master brain, finding a temporary habitat in the consciousnesses of the other female members of the family or in its own, until Jeanne’s accident at the end of the book, when two consciousnesses collide in a substantial clash during which one projects the film of her life before dying while the other comes to rejoin her at the same moment. The novel ends the same way as it starts, thus making the closure exact and circular, the same as the complete cycle of the brain and day. 

Marie Darrieussecq’s fourth novel, A Brief Visit With the Living, is most definitely her most striking and strongest novel from the literary standpoint. The challenges which she takes up by deconstructing the narration, and making a vivid use of the trembling of consciousnesses and interior whirring of voices indicate that the author does not choose to follow the path of simplicity. This can sometimes run the risk of making the reader bored and confused because of the difficulty they might experience while trying to reach the heights of the novel and connecting its dots, which altogether become ever smaller as the reader progresses into the novel. Simultaneously, the novel appears to be a brilliant synthesis of the author’s singular universe whose elements are to be found in all of her books: familial psychology, relationship between mothers and daughters (Breathing Underwater), border between the real and fantastic (My Phantom Husband), and omnipresence of the sea, its movements and changing colors, its paradoxically monstrous yet silent, and soothing yet disquieting rhythm in all the novels. The sea’s presence at the visible level produces here what the presence of a phantom produces at the invisible level: movements of the waves, connections that are ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed, an alternation. It provides the poetic legitimacy of that which appears to be merely sci-fi tricks from the brains penetrating entirely those of others, like those of the children in The Village of the Damned, all the way to the recruited who get remotely manipulated by the operators such as John Oppenheimer’s Candidate Mandchou. Here, the brains become “sea-esque” just like many other physical and visible places (“the sea should have been seen at its maximum, at full the brain like a sponge”), and the sea itself also possesses the qualities of the brain: “the sea that stocks and gets ready and waggles and goes on, and calms and starts again, blue brain.” This exchange of properties allows the book to develop like an epitome of the novel as it signals the possibility of total ubiquity: instead of the novelist-demiurge being by definition everywhere at the same time, they can get there via the image thanks to the idea of a global brain whose elements are all connected just like all the elements of the sea allowing one of its parts to be “here and there, at the same time.” 

Without being a novel about globalization, A Brief Visit With the Living makes the use of modern technologies of communication in order to allow instantaneous and simultaneous connection at various points in space as well as reception of the world “online”(not avoiding, here and there, the modality of certain references or onomatopoeia). The temporary unity of the narration (24 hours not lived in the same rhythm by all the characters, as time difference demands) is constantly perturbed by its spatial dispersal. At one point we are in Jeannne’s place in Buenos Aires, in her memory touring the world, at other times in Paris, at Anne’s place, in the family house in the Landes, where Nore and the mother live and where many common memories meet. And so even though, in the juxtaposition of various materials occupying those brains, we manage to piece together the history of that family, the explosion of data and the atomization of the points in space acknowledge the weaknesses and imbalances: mixture of languages (French, Spanish, and English) and departures more or less agreed upon turn the clan members into beings of in-between and border, “all exiled into a geography of dreams.” The great beauty of this book lies in the process of unfolding the lives in present or past images while randomly distributing primary or secondary thoughts and introducing an equally abstract plan. Thus, each brain we enter gains a little of distinction and depth; a direct contact with what touches them makes them even more vital, singular, and vibrant. A Brief Visit With the Living is ultimately a surprising book on the functioning of intelligence and memory, and on the stylistic translation of the sensible disorder reigning in the brain. The related experiences, the scientific and casual mastery of different occurrences of telekinesis, teleportation, hypermnesia or amnesia, all this contributes to the encyclopedic dimension of this novel of “inwardness,” one that effaces the boundaries between the outside and inside. We are reminded of this dimension by momentary collages distributed in the text, e.g. in songs, in particular the chorus adapted from Bashung, “I made the season in a cranial box,” in journal articles, horoscopes, Descartes’s discourse on spirit, etc. Our thoughts are formed in response to whatever happens, possibly another beautiful definition of the novel.

Tiphaine Samoyault

“The talented novelist of Pig Tales returns with a book about memory and absence, in which she takes the risks of experimentation: a successful bet. … Escape, evasion, disappearance, presence-absence, somnambulism, accidents of memory: the novel with all these themes in infinite variations, in fragments and collages, using solely the interior monologue. The flexible and inventive writing uses all methods available which appear as foreign bodies within the text with their proper typography, or those that melt into it like intimate thoughts…”

Isabelle Martin

“In this book, superbly and perfectly entitled A Brief Visit With the Living, an additional degree is crossed, but it’s more than just a degree. It’s an entire scale! The mental heights have themselves disappeared from which one counted the ‘grains of consciousness and memory.’ There’s no place, no support, not even a fragile one, where to observe and describe the distortions of the real. We are now in their midst, exposed to the same deformations, and similar drifts. It’s the audacity of the size, and the reader can merely sense and admit to being disoriented from his regular paths. Where are we then? Inside the heads, consciousnesses, and spirits… The cognizant novelistic machine records their thoughts and feelings not in order to reenact them, but to leave them in this state in their proper area. This sometimes creates the sensation of confusion. The punctuation participates in this disarray, to which a trivial syntax could not do justice. But nothing is trivial in the novel, which the author invites us to share. Discomfort is guaranteed.”

Patrick Kéchichian

“If taken for a classical tale of unsuccessful grief, the novel becomes a proposition of the aesthetics of figuration through its descriptions of bruised bodies.”

Eric Loret

“Marie Darrieussecq breaks down all the clichés. A blessing… Marie Darrieussecq picks up Virginia Woolf and Joyce where they left literature, i.e. on the site of delicate or profane sensations. With the wanderings of a little destroyer of clichés, she lets in a sacred draft.”

Jacques-Pierre Arnette

“Darrieussecq’s virtuosity is never complimentary or not even light. It’s a strange and inimitable beauty of profundities.”

Patrick Besson

“This is undoubtedly the best book by this author at the moment. One takes to it fast.”

Sylvain Bourmeau

Le Bébé, 2002
What is a baby?
Why so few babies mentioned in literature?
How does one explain the language used around them?
Why does one say "baby" and not "the baby?"
What is a mother? And why women rather than men?

P.O.L. Editor
Translated from the French by Martha Holmes
*** 


Critics on White, 2003
Translated from the French by Kate Gorton

“…in a world reduced to almost nothing, [White] is a subtle exploration of auditory sensations, as well as the visual and tactile.”

Isabelle Martin, Le Temps, August 30, 2003

“A reconstruction of the idea of ‘genres’—a romance novel squatting in one of adventure, as if the meeting of two beings is the ultimate adventure and the ultimate foreign body to conquer today. The writing is monochrome: not bland, but “white.” As expansive as the monochromatic infinity of Earth, as packed as liquids frozen by the cold, as immaterial as mirages formed by ice crystals in the atmosphere, it is reverence of the color white. Each sound is as silent as it is explosive, as if to reproduce its abrupt and incongruous appearance in this inhuman void: the hollow of the sentence. 

(…)

“Alchemy born from poetry, from mirages, from the miraculous, in a world more and more defined by the technical. And Marie Darrieussecq is the alchemist, changing an ultra-technical expedition into a crazy tale right before our eyes”

Nelly Kaprièlian, Les Inrockuptibles, September 2, 2003

“A novel more about sensations than narration, White doesn’t have to submit to the fluctuations and standards of classic prose, yet neither does it seek to avoid them. Its author does not reason against—something or someone—but with. (…) White confirms that everything is white, but between that white, lays the essential.

Pascal Gavilet, La Tribune de Genève, August 25, 2003

While we wait to find out if Pete and Edmée decide to take the logical path shown by the story, the ghosts give the reader a light, effective narration in which one finds winks, subtleties, and even total farce. As the author says about a children book found in the library of the ship that is taking the protagonists to the South Pole, "the recit is based on the progressive revelation of secrets."  Except that in this novel, the “little finger of Mother that knows it all” is replaced by ghosts.”

Alain Nicholas, L'Huamnité, September 4, 2003

“White (…): a sort of poem—soft and funny, mathematical and fantastical—in which perceptions of the world—material, mathematical, as well as sentimental—are put into words, impressions, visions and equations.”

Nathalie Crom, La Croix, September 4, 2003

“[One image chases another. Impression parasites on thought. A sensation unloads a reflection.] Darrieussecq invents a language model for recounting a life lived from the inside, for a brain which impresses and allures, for thoughts that play leap-frog. As she has already proven in A Brief Stay Among the Living, the novelist is unparalleled in creating the deceitful disorder of nightmares, of treating reality like a waking dream. Her explorative style finds ideal and virgin terrain in the great white of Antarctica.” Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle, September 22, 20

Le Pays [The Country], 2005

This was not her first love, and it was far from being her first book.

A room is prepared for the baby that is coming; the walls are decorated.  Notebooks are purchased; a title and a subject are found; the first words are written.  In the beginning there are a few sentences, a few cells, but soon there are many, a heart, a chapter.  The body plays its role: for the birth of the child it is completely necessary.  For the book it is an obstacle that the writer must forget in order to create the novel.  But it is love that is responsible for both; passion, desire and love are the well from which both the novel and the child emerge.

Marie Rivière, the principal character of this book, is a writer who has just left Paris in order to return to her native country with her husband and 2 year old child.  This move to the country where she spent her childhood and adolescence, and where her mother and father still live, happens at the same time that she discovers that she is pregnant.  This land and the feelings that are aroused by the return provide her with the subject for a novel , which she starts to write.  Creating a novel at the same time that she is creating a child provides her with another subject, which is the literary process, and how this process is similar to and differs from the biological process of creation.

With very little dialogue, a thin plot, rather dense prose, and a constant shift of point of view, this book, more of an intimate journal than a novel, is not an ordinary story.   The majority of the story takes place in the writer’s mind, and the writer invites us to share this rich world of her thoughts, her feelings, facts that she finds interesting, and her observations about the life she is living.

The above quotation from Le Pays was chosen for two reasons.  First, the combination love/literature (and by extension love of literature) in the same breath (or thought).  And then its simple, almost banal tone leads one to think that it is the destiny of the author to lead this life and pursue this work. To be a mother, a lover, and a writer; there is no other choice.

Bruce Fickett
***

Critics on Le Pays [The Country]
Translated from the French by Kristen Murphy

Le Pays (The Country)
World in and of itself

While trying to define the essence of “a country”, MD creates a clever definition of the self that is perpetually changing.

Darrieussecq invites us deep into the land of her fluid thoughts and we follow them joyfully: when boredom might threaten her writing, she writes shrewdly in several simple sentences that always entertain us; however, Darrieussecq lets this shrewdness stop in her character Marie Rivière’s narration, because her language shows all the stratums of a person’s identity. The central question in this book is that of belonging. What is it made of? Does it come from the dead (the memory), from noticing the world (the family), from love (the couple), from language…In short what is it that makes a “country”?

If one is looking for an author who writes of metamorphoses, nuances, ghosts, and discoveries, it can be found in The Country; although Darrieussecq fails to explain the main point in the novel (to define a tangible geography), this elevates the text to another level. The river runs, nourished by the tributaries of France, Europe, the world, from the dead and the living, and most of all from love. “They lived together for a period of time; a bubble formed between time and the others.” The only geography that Darrieussecq describes takes the form of a mould: the “dead” element in the living, the “couple” element in the “family,” the latter moving to another vast unit, an embryo of a fetus that the narrator waits to become a part of her body.

Writing, like feelings, are finally all that these elements can rely on- the rest is fiction, seeming to tell us that the narrator is attempting to return to her family in “B country” (like Darrieussecq’s native Bayonne?), but she will fail (for the better) and return to Paris, the “country” that chose her, as if there had not been a time when she belonged.

But writing is also a language, and how we completely adhere to it when, “The French order it [language] to clarify the nature of things. The masculine dominates the feminine; if all the women of the world were with a male dog, they would be obliged, the women and the dog, to become masculine: the women and the dog are just being obedient.” In the end, The Country is less of a book about belonging than a joyful itinerary of (re)approval. It’s about a trying to find belonging in life.

Nelly Kaprièlian, Les Inrockuptibles, August 17th -23rd 2005

***
The “disappearing public place”
In The Country, Marie Darrieussecq struggles with the questions of one’s relationship and belonging with the Earth, in a novel and unexpected way.

Marie Darrieussecq, in each of her novels, hesitates and oscillates between two possibilities, two hypotheses, and two ways of being, either with presence or absence. In true literature, one can understand the latter. It’s this absence that bravely takes the reader to the border that separates fullness and emptiness and shows the reader who marks this distinction. Of these two lands, the second is evidently more disturbing. Although absence is not the uniform, spread out, or equal, it is always plural, different, and strange. The author’s courage let’s us explore this universe and sometimes let’s us live there; she binds the citizens or ghosts of this “country” and their knowledge together. 

In the last paragraph of her novel, MD writes succinctly that: “The ghosts do not prowl around in limbo. They only exist in a collision. This is the only other way for them to appear.” When Darrieussecq’s first book, Truismes (Pig Tales), a flamboyant and carnal novel that frightened us about our most banal actions, is compared side by side with The Country, it is easy to see that it is the more incarnate of the two. But this incarnation does not claim its victory over absence. It does not filled like a hole, an emptiness, or a depression. Elsewhere, in this domain, this kind of victory would mark a sort of end of writing altogether… “You find that writing will bring you back to the table, intensely receptive of the ghosts.” 

The Broken Self

“This book speaks of living and being born somewhere, combining these types of rundown and diverse people” metaphorically from the map of France, from Paris to the south, to the Atlantic coast. Her country is both recognizable and imaginary, undoubtedly taking part in the Pyrenees but also residing in a place where there are no maps; this place is given a fictional name, Yuorangui, a country that has just been granted its independence. “Everything that made me human, I took with me. I had become m/e (j/e).” This broken “m/e,” as the psychoanalysts say, “not broken nor schizophrenic, but split and undone.” This is the state of the narrator: “My broken self (j/e) was running in my thoughts…and absorbed myself and was absorbed by the road, the trees, the country, these thoughts and this writing.” 

The novel is built around alternating voices: the first person direct and indirect, whom follows the exterior narration, the two shifting effortlessly and becoming two distinct voices. “She tried for 20 years to return home, but now it did not matter if she got home, but more so of embarking on a new exile…” With her “old language,” her particular funeral customs (the House of the Dead [Maison des morts] where one visit the deceased who are holograms), her substantial prose can elucidate an exhaustive knowledge, making this country resemble an island. To the question of her origins, there is a simple response: “I was from here.” Even in the final analysis, the identity is never just “the place of the unconscious.” On this strategy, Darrieussecq’s novel renews itself by an original and unexpected track, the question of belonging (to a language, to a world, to a nation), without maintaining the least nostalgia for the classic vision or traditional of taking root. “We were from a country if it was wanted; but this country was the realm of emptiness, a planet of monkeys covered in sand where the arm of a lost statue rises up from the ground.” All the same, there is not weakness nor compliance in favor of fights for independence: “All of Yuorangui who claimed to represent their country had lost a bit of their reason. Everyone who claimed to be from Yuorangui also were fearful, like being fearful of madmen.” At the end, there is nothing to say that is verifiable or suspicious: “She was standing on the Earth and it was turning.”

The other element of this book is relations. Marie belongs to a set of siblings, she is a part of a family, received and transmitted. She must keep her place, advance, be a sister and a mother, between a dead brother, Paul, and another, Pablo, an adopted child, who becomes crazy and calls himself the son of General de Gaulle. The few pages on Pablo are among the most beautiful and just of the entire book. At the point where these two storylines meet up, the main question appears suddenly with force and urgency. And above all, with a sense of obviousness: we are never finished taming our ghosts.

-Patrick Kéchichian, Le Monde, 26th August 2005

 ***

Marie Darrieussecq’s novel, chosen by Télérama and France Culture 

One reads Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel with the impression of lightly floating. This spirit escapes; it dreams, evades, comes back, like following the countryside. Without a doubt there are liberties taken in the text, following along the spirit’s digressions and wandering. But there are also links with the invisible, like all of the ghosts that accompany and haunt us, one new time: the sensation of emptiness, omnipresence, the strangeness of our presence in the world, death, and absence…

The Country creates a world in which a young woman leaves Paris to return to her childhood home, a place nearby the sea and mountains which greatly resembles the native region where Darrieussecq comes from, born in Bayonne in 1969. A writer and a mother of a young son, she is pregnant and has started to write a new novel. This doubling of expectations- a child and a book- that she equally lets come to her- are born into a reflection that progressively becomes more and more intimate. These questions, Is being born a part of the senses? What constitutes our origins? A region, a language, traditions?, substitute themselves little by little for a more singular memory. The brother who went missing several days after his birth, the meeting with her husband Diego, the necessity and the mystery of writing. The Country evokes a personal geography, vibrant with intelligence and sincerity. The story is one intertwined with genealogy and family, with sentimentality and love. It portrays geography of the living and of the dead, one that only literature could portray even at a distance. It doesn’t matter what country you come from- all that matters is to learn to live with yourself.

-Michel Abescat, Télérama, 31st August 2005

 ***

… The Country is a brilliant reflection of the two tracks of identity and of the question of one’s origins…

Baptiste Liger, Technikart, September 2005

 ***

Marie Darrieussecq is born somewhere…

Regarding the question of identity, of belonging, the writer produces a novel that is very simply beautiful, fluid, and intoxicating.

The sea and the long beaches, mountains plunging to the sea, an assortment of cities and towns, between all of this a criss crossing patterns of main roads and secondary ones- in short, what constitutes a “country?” Being born there, having this countryside as a scenery for still powerful childhood memories, does this suffice as a definition for belonging? Does this draw itself upon the contours of an individual’s identity? It is a question that shows just below the surface, throughout the prose of Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel. Her novel is simply beautiful, fluid and profound, astonishingly absent of heaviness, even though the material that she tackles is dense.

There are two tracks that the narration takes: Marie Rivière tells the story, in first person and in the present. The other voice is in the third person, which describes the place and observes Marie, who watches her live and evolve, and who listens to her thoughts, although at a distance. Marie Rivière is a writer, she has a husband, a young son, two brothers, Diego and Tiot, and she is pregnant with another child- a child whom she knows will be a girl and who’s name she has already chosen: Éphipanie (Epiphany). Marie and her unborn daughter leave Paris and move to “the country”: the place where Marie herself was born, where here parents live, and where a long time ago, her brother died. The country of Yuoangui, in between France and Spain, “a little showy, it has an easy beauty that the residents seem to pull over their roots like suspenders.” This country is trying to acquire its independence. 

The Country incorporates superb writing on childhood, maternity, death, and absence- the absence of others and the absence of the self. This novel is stamped with a worrisome sense of unease. The order of the chapters creates a pseudo-itinerary, one that follows Marie’s thoughts, who is pregnant, a bit empty, and whose vagabond reflections falsely spiral around the question of belonging. This belonging could be to a place and to a memory that attaches itself to the narrator- visual sensations, smells…- to a language, a genealogy and a family, to loved ones in the present, those who disappeared, and those to come. 

Also, belonging- something that day after day affects our actions, our affections, our harmless, but most decisive choices- belonging, it can be defined as faithfulness to oneself, to one’s desires, and to one’s destiny. 

Natalie Crom, La Croix, September 8th 2005

 ***

Marie Darrieussecq’s Basque Dream 

With her novel The Country, Marie Darrieussecq rediscovers the land of her ancestors. In an independent Basque country, ghosts and newborns come together…it is a breath of fresh air, but with some insolence. 

A confession from Marie Darrieussecq, the idea for this new novel germinated three years ago when a journalist from a Spanish Basque television station came to interview her. The reporter saw Darrieussecq, the author of Pig Tales [Truismes] and born in Bayonne in 1969, as a Basque writer with French expressions! “Whenever you like it or not, you are Basque, just like an escargot is an escargot,” the reporter informed her. 

Far from offending her, Marie Darrieussecq was enchanted by this definition. And this pure literary product of the Rive gauche, which takes place in the very Jacobin Rue d’Ulm in Paris, begins to learn this language ruffled with guttural consonants, the same ones that cradled Darrieussecq during her childhood. She gave a traditional Basque middle name to her daughters and frequented assiduously her fellow countrymen of Bilbao and San Sebastian. 

Darrieussecq’s novel is the result of a return to her roots. Her heroine, Marie Rivière, returns to live in a foreign land in the middle of Europe, with its island feel, a totemic mountain, its modern style villas dotted along the cliffs, and its museums [uninteresting/inert/limp?] that resemble two drops of water in Basque country. This Basque country does not have the traditional frontons nor espadrilles, instead it is full of iridescence and atmospheric phenomenon, and could not be portrayed any better since Pierre Loti.

The porosity of the world

The only difference from Pierre Loti’s novel, “Ramuntcho” is that in Marie Darrieussecq’s plotline, a reunified Euskadi has seceded for independence! It’s a stroke of novelistic genius, or simple anticipation, as Spanish Basque country seems on the edge of auto determination, which nevertheless gives the novel the feel of having woken up from a dream. There are ironic occasions that are nearly imperceptible: a concert by a fierce and wild group that supports the independence movement, a colloquium where a “great writer of the nation” pontificates his views. And then there is the meeting with Christelle a friend from middle school, who was renamed “The Swallow” [Hirondelle] in the Basque language. She owns a shop on a road “formerly known as French Republic Road” in a city that could be Bayonne. Darrieussecq takes us to the edge of unwritten history, in an ancient, although tiny land. 

But do not worry; Marie Darrieussecq will not turn into a polemic. Honestly, this story focuses on her family drama more so than current politics. This family drama includes an adopted brother who lost his mind and her mother, an artist, who is more famous than her daughter (what rivalry)! But these scraps of her memory are recovered by her unique obsession, because these memories are piously conserved in the form of holograms in the bizarre “House of the Dead” in Basque country, the land of her ancestors. This walk down memory lane coincides with a double creation: that of her unborn daughter and of a new novel. Marie Rivière excels at describing the internal and hormonal changes to her body. Enough said about the suspense where nothing seems impossible; at page 290, young Épiphanie is born and the novel about family origins has already been written. 

According to Darrieussecq, ghosts and newborns suckle from the same breast in the literary world. Darrieussecq’s detractors will pester her the most for her biggest problem in the book, the baby’s bedroom. Or about the certain typographical affectations that do not replace a truly novel elaboration. Fans of the Basque writer “with French expression” will marvel at the porosity of the world, of this art of shifting reality on its axis. And what’s more, this [ ] that effortlessly flys over an abyss of white light, above the Atlantic.

François Dufay, Le Point, September 8th, 2005

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Euskadi Told Me

Writing is like a long-distance race that takes away your energy. The first sentence in Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel makes you dive in without warning: “ I was running, unaware of those I was passing by. I was running, [tam tam….] slowly, at my own pace. One hour, right ahead. In a breath. The road was clear. I was running. In a certain manner, I had also left writing behind. The book was writing itself on its own. I was running, becoming a thought bubble. One comic book character came into the strip. Her body was her problem, her brain was satisfied with her organs.” 

Marie Darrieussecq’s style is always recognizable, even a certain toughness. In 1996, with the publication of Pig Tales [Truismes], The Birth of Ghosts, and most recently, White, the reader knows that her descriptions and sentences are always tied to the sensational. And there are always some ghosts and spirits, like she was capable of walking between two worlds, our and the land of the dead. 

With The Country, Marie Darrieussecq begins to tell us the tale of her return to the land of her ancestors. To better cover her tracks (or to confuse us), she splits up the plotline in two distinct parts, while thus multiplying the points of view. 

At first, thanks to the interior monologue, we follow the state of Marie Rivière’s soul. The heroine, who decided with her husband Diego and her young son Tiot, to leave Paris and return to Yuoangui, the country of her roots, an imaginary land wedged “between France and Spain”. And here is the central part of the plot, Rivière’s return to her roots, where we meet the spirit of her beloved grandmother, or where she makes us feel guilty for leaving Paris, where her brother Pablo is institutionalized because he thinks he is Charles de Gaulle. 

The other change in the novel is the transformation from “I” to “he”. And the text takes the high road, underlining the importance of Rivière’s reintegration into her childhood home. The plot thus progresses by intertwining the two voices. 

This narrative dichotomy permits the author to explore the country of “Yourangui”, like the fictitious country of Syldavia in the Adventures of Tintin, opens up with impunity. Despite all of this, behind the makeup of fiction and its pelotas, ferias, old language, characteristic folklore, ambivalent desire for autonomy, we can see Basque country (Euskadi for close friends), where Marie Darrieussecq was born in the heart of “BAB” (Bayonne, Anglet, Biarritz). It is a highly sentimental land, so much so that Darrieussecq transfigures the geography under the name “BCB”. The other indication (and certainly not the last) is that the author confides in us, concerning Pierre Loti, “that it was all the rage,” she writes, “to play up your Yuoangui ancestors” while we keep thinking about the book Ramuntcho by Loti, oh yes, that Loti, don’t be embarrassed about it!

Like all of Marie Darrieussecq’s novels, there is always the question of travel. A trip in The Country, is experienced like an epiphany, in the most broad sense of the word. Marie Darrieussecq digs deep into her past and finishes by recognizing that “it’s maybe that, being somewhere. A geographic sentiment, knowing a land like one knows a face.” What good would our trip be on this earth if we lived our life trying to forget our roots? 

Olivier Delacroix, Le Figaro, September 15th, 2005

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The Country 

Between faction and political fiction, the theme of Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel is returning to one’s native country. But, most of all, the novel follows a radical shift from the subject matter at to the narrator of a very psychological book, thanks to a choice in the writing style that is simple: alternating from the first person to the third person narration and from the original “I” [je] to the broken “I/me” [j/e].

The narrator, who is pregnant with the little Éphiphanie, her husband Diego, born in Patagonia, and their two-year-old son, Tiot, leave Paris for Yuoangui country. Somewhere between Spain and Landes de Gascogne, this small country is requesting its long-awaited independence. The local authorities have wooed the young woman, a well-known author, hoping to get her support in the name of national literature. But she hardly speaks the ‘old language.’ Tiot, who assimilates quickly to the Yuoangui language, as well as French and Spanish, helps his mother as an interpreter for most of the everyday tasks. Thus in this half serious, half burlesque manner, the novel spreads out to encompass a complex plot about her family, including a plastic surgeon mother, an adopted brother with schizophrenia, Pablo, who is convinced that he is the son of General de Gaulle, and the memory of her grandmother, Amova, who gives her thoughts on the metamorphosis of the worship of the dead, seemingly inherited from traditional ethnic dress. The House of the Dead is a high-tech place that allows everyone to speak with the deceased (reappearing in the form of a hologram), who explain what haunts people in contemporary society. But the essential point in the novel is about a person’s connection with his or her geography and other factors of his or her identity. Using an almost poetic license, Marie Darrieussecq cites the body, gender, and a person’s character as an outline to explain the continuum of physics, biology, anthropologic laws, and culture. But what makes this novel tangible to its 21st century readers? It is the fusion of naturalism, the positivist social critique, which reminds us of the majority of our psychological fixations. The Country is without a doubt one of the most important novels of fall 2005. 

Spirit, October 2005

 ***

The narration is full of extremely resonant paragraphs. The soundness of its observations, the choice of words will touch all of the male readers, but more so the female readers. You can count on the women readers to admire these paragraphs in the same sanctimonious manner as buying a piece of furniture at Ikea. This mobility of the descriptions, or the fog that surrounds them, is the basis of their charm. Darrieussecq’s Basque country is not a tourist’s guide; neither espadrilles nor the traditional Basque cloth are discussed. This entire land is seen with a view to the future and to the past, which is extremely different than the exoticism of Pierre Loti, which can be appreciated to the extreme.

Épiphanie is simply born by the stroke of the writer’s pen, whereas The Country was born line by line through the heart and soul of the woman who writes about it and the reader who follows her footsteps. The novel is a veritable family story, showing the double personality of the narrator’s mother and father, the birth of a daughter, and the unexpected cult of death. 

M. Delaunay-Brohan, La République des Pyrénées, September 30th, 2005

SHORT STORIES

Zoo, 2006

A collection of 15 short stories.

“Fiction always surpasses reality, no matter what one says, and gives a better account of it than do witnesses.”  - Connaissance des singes 

You walk in this zoo with your eyes instead of your legs.  The cages are the short stories and in each one is a strange beast, human or not, that you study  through the bars, and which sometimes, studies you. 

There is, for example, in Connaissance des singes a monkey involved with the lives of three generations of women, a monkey who is a bit sick, who speaks French and who lives in the house of the grandmother in a most bizarre fashion.  The monkey becomes healthy, stops speaking, and leaves the house.  The grandmother, the mother and the daughter also have a relationship that is a bit sick.  Can they follow the example of the monkey?

This zoo is really populated by some strange creatures.  There are, for example, in On ne se brode pas tous les jours les jambes, women who, instead of having their period, have their “slough”.  That’s right:  each 28 days their skin sheds…and if one sheds one’s skin after having embroidered one’s legs in order to be beautiful at one’s sister’s wedding - well, that’s problematic.  But men find it irresistible!

And the strange psychology of Juergen, gendre ideal, in which a woman, tormented by her lack of progress in her art of photography, looks more and more profoundly, literally, in herself to find a means to see others, her subjects, with more clarity.  At the same time she believes, perhaps with reason, that Juergen, her husband, and in a way her father, who has neither profession or art, can see everything that is hidden to her.

Yes, fiction always surpasses reality, but what a new reality results!  These stories are wonderfully unique.

Bruce Fickett
ARTICLES

***

Translated from the French by Rachel Lomonaco:

This article appeared in the “Rebonds” section of Libération on April 10, 2006.  I wrote it with the generous collaboration of a number of friends, notably Annette Messager, Anne Ferrer, Virginie Despentes, Beatriz Preciado, Celia Houdart and Nelly Charles, and the precious theoretical contribution of Anne Simon and Christine Detrez, whose book A leur corps défendant on women and art, will appear in June 2006 at Seuil Publishing house in Paris. 

As someone coming from literature, I uncovered the world of art, and I learned a lot of things from it.  For example, that women could not really construct a work of art.  This was written in the catalogue devoted to painter Jean-Marc Bustamante (collection la création contemporaine, éditions Flammarion, 2005). 

Christine Macel, who interviewed Xavier Veilhan, asked him why women “do not go the distance”, why so few “make it past ten years.”  “You (Bustamante, Veilhan, or Thomas Hirschhorn) you produce so much, you experiment in different dimensions, there is a sort of flow.  I asked myself recently why this is not the case with women.”  And I thought of Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Gina Pane (this word flow - flux), Rebecca Horn or Jenny Holzer, who still have to prove themselves.  

We owe to Christine Macel the decisive exposition “Dyonisiac”, that I saw open in 2005 at the Centre Pompidou.  An exposition devoted to promising artists, and very instructive: in front of a list of names, 14 masculine first names, I concluded that there was not one promising female artist in the world today…

Bustamante goes one better (it is necessary to cite everything from his inspired text, where we find the grandiose and 19th-century breath of a Michelot or a Renan: “Yes, man needs to conquer territories; woman finds her territory and she stays there…Women search for one man; a man wants all women.  The woman, once she has found her territory, she stays there… Men are always searching for virgin territories.” 

According to a prejudice that goes back to the first outlines of anthropology, woman was made for private space (the home, the “staff” that Veilhan will cite further on): in brief, the vagina and uterus.  As if the shape of the sexual organs were able to form a thought.  A prehistorian like Claudine Cohen shows that it is a complete fiction of science to think that Mr. Cromagnon was hunting the mammoth while Mrs. Cromagnon was waiting for him in the cave… Both were, at the least and on a regular basis, big hunters of ferocious weasels.

It is true that once a woman penetrates the self-named playing field of men, she is called a “phallic woman”: that is the term Macel uses to describe Louise Bourgeois.  By a jump in historical thought, she attempts then to excuse these poor lingering females: “Women were not able to express themselves as artists until very recently, since the 70’s; before that few existed.”  Sonia Delaunay, Maya Deren, Lili Brick, Germaine Richier, Barbara Hepworth… the list of these who were artists before the 70’s could be longer. 

Certainly a woman who creates must take on the tools or language already formatted by a man’s world, which could add to the confusion of those whose thoughts are already confused.  In effect, the dominated must pass by the field of the dominant in order to get out of it. A historical alternative was to reinvent the tools and symbols traditionally feminine, which explains why the 70’s were effectively seen as full of knits, sheets and houses, of blood cycles and feminine moods, portrayed in art.  Without taking away their great rereading of the body and stereotypes, Orlan, Bourgeois, Messager… all evolved further in their explorations.

<>Yet Bustamante challenges their capacity ofr mobility. I continue to read, more and more astonished, learning for example that Nan Golding no “longer really moved” once she had found her line.  But it is in the generalizations that Bustamante reaches his truly epic dimension: “Men take larger risks, such as being hated, being controversial, spending a long time in difficult fields.”  

But maybe Bustamante is right.   In the idiotic fashion of Mr. Homais:  an insulting discourse but convenient, immemorially conventional.  It is so reassuring, may the woman stays at home! With the additional cheap feeling (women work today) to give the impression of saying forbidden things… To men, then, the difficult things!  If woman was made for the close and the easy, it is without a doubt because her baby sucks at her breast.  And this must be because they are sensitive to the cold the women artists “knit” so often, and because they are so confined that they do not try to conquer the “virgin territories”.   It is true that we still find people to exclude Orlan from the field of art, or Pipilotti Rist, or Sarah Lucas… or to say that they do not take any risks, certainly not any to be hated… But this notion of artistic risk that Bustamante uses, I know it well: it is also a bit dated, at least since the 70’s, since the masculine “bull’s horn” of Leiris.

Women artists will be then a bit “stay-at-home.” They “take refuge in the social hut where we want to see them (Veilhan)”.  But if we include them in the artistic notions of music and letters, then in effect, a Duras or a Jelinek was always scared of the controversial, a Björk always dug the same furrow, and Simone Weil was always known for her quiet side. It would then be in art and strictly in art that women are good only for producing works in crochet?  It is true that there are market laws… The galleries, who display them too little… And certain women themselves who, once they have a little bit of power, like Christine Macel, magnificently integrate the prejudices on their sex. 

That men and women produce different works seems to me an idea rich, interesting, more than the pretended “neutered” often used for the word “masculine”.  But as if by chance, this difference is generally used to minimize the works of women.  Happily I write, I am not an “artist”, if not I would not dare to think that I have a brain, whose shape is not inevitably that of a uterus.

Marie Darrieussecq, 2006