Understudies: Short Stories

by Marie Redonnet

Fiction. Translated from the French by Jordan Stump. "'Twelve little machines to make death and failure,' Redonnet calls the twelve characters--or the twelve stories--we find in this book, and it's every tale we find here tells the same story, albeit in twelve different forms, the story of a kind of erasure, of disappearance and undoing, owing to the characters' fatal need to make of themselves a copy of another"--From the translator's introduction. Marie Redonnet has published five novels, a book of stories, and a book of poems. Leaping Dog Press has released the poems and short stories in English translation for the first time. Jordan Stump teaches at University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He has published three previous volumes of fiction by Marie Redonnet.

Genres: Short Stories

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2005

About the author

Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was Redonnet's first work of fiction. It's a collection of twelve brief and strikingly similar stories (even more similar to each other than the novels are that make up the triptych) that eventually all run together in one's mind. Redonnet also assigns a dizzying array of near-rhyming names to her endless parade of characters, which from a stylistic standpoint I can't say I'm on board with. The stories all feel like condensed prototypes for her later works, less developed and lacking the narrative depth of the novels. As such, I found them much less intriguing. Perhaps if I'd read these first I might feel differently. It's hard to say.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absorbing and mystifying. Akin to holding an unidentified object in your hand. Each story is another turn of the object, recontextualizing both the view that came before and the one that will come after. Once finished, you do not know what the object is for sure, but you understand it a great deal more.

[Adrian Dornan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is just the sylvia plath fig tree but somehow worse

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightfully strange collection of 12 stories. The book becomes hypnotic as the stories shadow and echo one another. Redonnet writes like no one else. She's a new favorite.

[Reader]

Dark miniature stories, almost like fairytales.

Am spinning from the wild names and déjà vu!

Many artistic and entrepreneurial figures...