Description
Book SynopsisWanda (1970) a cult film classic, exerts a fascination for artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Leger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker.
Trade Review'The glory that Duras and Loden and Leger find in degradation isn't a passive, incandescent despair-a psychic corpse by the side of the highway, radiant in the purity of its hopelessness-so much as the opposite: a despair that remains curious about the world, and thirsty for justice and company, whether it's the company of critical subjects or a bunch of drunk strangers in a bar booth.'-Leslie Jamison, Bookforum; 'What is initially Leger's explicit hesitance to create a biography that does not do Loden justice is transformed into her own story, one of how the lives of women seep into one another.' - Nathan Scott McNamara, Los Angeles Review of Books; 'I've just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger, translated by Cecile 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; 'Leger's writing is concerned with the value of its own creation, of its possibility to respond to what she terms elsewhere the 'annihilation' of narrative through male violence. This writing is made through doubt about its own capacities, and its own efficacies. But I think there is a benefit to faltering at the possibilities of expression.' - Katie da Cunha Lewin, The White Review; 'This book is autobiography, it's biography, it's about gender, it's film writing, it's writing about place...It's an incredibly rich work and, (...), highly recommended.' - Richard Barrett, Manchester Review of Books; '[F]or Leger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Leger's extraordinary short books.' - David McCooey, Sydney Review of Books; 'Brilliant little book' - Valeria Luiselli on Twitter; 'Assigned to write the entry about Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden's art-house movie, for a film encyclopedia, Leger 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 Magazine; 'Inventive and affecting, Suite for Barbara Loden takes both the novel and biography to new and interesting places.' -Eimear McBride, The Guardian; '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, Leger 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; 'A moving, subtle novel about the need to create.' - Le Monde; 'When I set out to review Suite for Barbara Loden, I realized I didn't have much to say, exactly, beyond what Leger says. I wanted to show how she shows how one woman's experience is filtered through another, collapses into another. And I wanted to show how we (women) connect with Wanda-even extraordinary, glamorous, intellectual women like Leger or Loden, and even women generations younger than Wanda, like myself-how the book sucks in every woman who approaches it. -The Rumpus; 'Moving descriptions of Loden's performance in Wanda dot the narration as Leger struggles to reveal joy or pain Loden may have hidden, beyond her early work as a pin-up girl, her marriage to Elia Kazan, and a 1964 Tony Award for her role in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. Translators Lehrer and Menon give Leger's voice immense verve in English as her small task becomes an obsession.'-Kirkus Reviews; 'I am not a movie buff - in fact, I rarely watch movies, especially the 'important' ones - but I realize I love reading descriptions of film scenes. There's a kind of inert vividness to these descriptions, a scrim between me and the dramatic moment, that I find almost erotic. Leger intersperses descriptions of Wanda with passages about how she came to know this movie, how she tried and tried to understand Barbara Loden herself. Woven into these, too, are autobiographical asides. One begins: 'Once upon a time the man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men.' The result of these combined fragments is delicious and mysterious.'-Edan Lepucki, The Millions; 'In Suite for Barbara Loden, Leger enacts a kind of double excavation in her desire 'to excavate a miniature model of modernity' that is Barbara Loden, an unearthing that has no teleological endpoint because it continues beyond the scope of the text being written. This excavation, indeed, must engage with the many texts that inform it, shaping the journey and, in effect, refracting the writing subject back on to herself-a fantasmatic act of the other becoming the self.' -Music & Literature; 'Beautifully translated.' -Times Literary Supplement; 'Leger jump-cuts through time and space with the expertise of a movie director.'-Joanna Walsh; '[A] mesmerizing work of unexpected beauty.' -Book Riot; 'Suite for Barbara Loden comes across as a dream, grounded in the women Leger researches but flowing into aspects she brings to life through fiction (...) The book absorbs in its absorption, its willful fixation on a subject she should have passed over altogether, or at the least done less with.' -Full Stop; 'I found Wanda thanks to Nathalie Leger's Suite for Barbara Loden. Translated from the French last year by Natasha Lehrer and Cecile Menon and tagged as fiction, Suite reads as part biography (of Loden), part memoir (of Leger), part critical study (of Wanda). It also offered a sensibility, a style, and ultimately, an interpretive lens through which to view the film, which emerges, in Leger's reading, as a portrait of (female) submission as resistance.' -The Hairpin
