4 Women Authors to Read This Fall!
With the French literary fall in full swing, and many discussions about the latest novels of Gael Faye, Kamel Daoud, and Aurélien Bellanger, we’ve turned our attention first to the books of four women authors: Emma Becker, Julia Deck, Ananda Devi and Maylis de Kerangal. You’ll understand why by reading our staff picks below!
Reading List
Julia Deck’s formidable narrative borrows from every genre (family investigation, memoir, formative novel, autofiction) to put into words her mother’s life and their relationship, at once complex and changing, fusional and distant, loving and conflicted. A stubborn and impossible love, like the mission the author sets herself, except that impossible is not Julia Deck.
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At the invitation of the collection Ma Nuit au Musée (éd. Stock) – which has produced such little jewels as Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Like a Sky inside and Lola Lafon’s Quand tu entendras cette chanson – Mauritian writer Ananda Devi spent a night in Lyon’s Montluc Prison Museum.
The history of this prison, opened in 19221 and closed in 2009, reflects France’s darkest hours in the 20th century, when Resistance fighters, Jews including the children of Izieu, and Algerian independence fighters were imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes executed. Common law prisoners were the last to be imprisoned there before it was closed in 2009, and the memorial opened.
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*** WARNING: THIS BOOK CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND EXPLICIT SEXUAL CONTENT ***
In extremely graphic and fluid prose, whose quiet audacity and freedom is reminiscent of the writings of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Emma Becker examines her love and sex life from every angle, with staggering frankness.
Emma Becker tells of the torments of soul and body, of expectation, of the rise of pleasure, of feelings of ecstasy and abandonment, of the lack of the other and of guilt (about being a bad mother and an unfaithful wife). It’s precisely because she says it all, because she doesn’t seek to aestheticize her acts, but instead to anchor them in (banal) everyday life, and in the fallibility of the body, that her scenes endear them to us.
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November, 2022, our narrator — a woman — is told by a police officer over the phone that a cadaver has been found at the foot of a cliff, on the beach of Le Havre, a coastal town of Normandy where she grew up.
The investigation team needs her to come to the commissariat of Le Havre, the city where she grew up, the next day to answer a few questions. She is informed that a movie ticket has been found in the pants of the victim, with her phone number handwritten on it. Who is this man? And how was he connected to her? This brutal revelation prompts a profound and meandrous introspection in between various layers of the narrator’s and the city’s past.
