Alice, la saucisse

by Sophie Jabès

There is nothing wrong with Alice. She is beautiful, young, intelligent and happy, living in Rome, enjoying its sights, food, fashion, and gleefully casting aside any man who dares to show an interest in her. She is untouchable and revels in the natural power she holds over the opposite sex. As she elegantly struts down Rome's busy streets, her legs whisper "catch me if you can." Then her father tells her one day she is "no Marilyn Monroe" and that she "must be nice to men" in order to find her prince. The pathway to self-destruction opens up immediately for the self-obsessed beauty queen, whose self-image quickly takes a nose dive. Wounded by these hurtful comments from a father she barely sees, Alice begins to fill her gaping hole of anxiety with food: calzone and mozzarella, flavored ice creams, chocolate tarts and pizza. Growing huger by the day, Alice loses all sense of refinement and allows herself to be used by countless men. Some pay her with money and others with food, which she eats as she offers her body and her speciality the ice cream cornet. Is this what being nice means? Presenting matters of body image and the self, Alice is a surreally comic tale with dark undertones and serious links to body dysmorphia, depression and madness. It casts an interesting and original light on the way the female body is presented in society today, and subtly displays the connection between apparent image and self-esteem.

Genres: Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2007

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief nightmarish fable of appetitive behavior, body politics, and consumer society. In this way, it is reminiscent of Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales, but less broadly satirical, and arguably all the harsher. Perhaps depending on how completely bleak your sense of humor is.

[Anita Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a posthumanist hellhole. I say that with nothing but praise.

I could not have loved this book more. In an ocean of chicklit where women strive for beauty and true love at all costs, balancing careers and men and an oh-so-cute bumbling personality flaw, like overshopping or the tendency to be amusingly clumsy, Alice is an anti-heroine who completely destroys herself without ever looking back. Irrational, afraid, unable to see herself as she really is, she commits continual and irrevocable acts of mental and physical violence against herself until there is nothing left for her to do but commit the most lunatic act of degradation. Read the rest of the review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/?p=192

[Dov Zeller]

This is a slim novel, a fable (a little reminiscent in its feeding frenzies of Miyazaki's Spirited Away), a grotesquely close and yet oddly distant look into the life of a woman who, after her father tells her she's not pretty, starts eating extraordinary amounts of food and engaging in daily sex with strangers because 1) her parents are toxic and profoundly self-absorbed and they have no capacity to see or mirror Alice, who feels invisible and senses, inside of herself, a void that must be filled; 2) her father told her to be nice to men (that that is the only way to be loved, and his version of 'nice' is something along the lines of: forget your own selfhood and never say no); and 3) she finds herself getting paid for sex and the money supports her food obsession.

I didn't get very far into Alice before the repetitive nature of the prose, the grotesque scenes of eating and sex and more eating (the eating while giving blow jobs was a bit much for me given my propensity for both existential and actual nausea) and the perpetual checked-out-ness of the protagonist or the narrative voice led me in other directions (i.e. away from this book, toward others I have out of the library. "The Wild Life of Our Bodies" "At the Existentialist Cafe.")

The opening paragraph is interesting. The book's opening line: "In the beginning were Alice's legs." The biblical reference to the creation of the world that is also the first sign of Alice's profound self-absorption (self-creation? authorial creation?) I appreciate the way there is so much tangled up and hard to separate--the relationship between narrator and subject; myth and selfhood; the blurry lines between self-absorbed grandiosity and self-absorbed misery; questions of innocence vs. experience. There is a lot to consider, but I didn't find it compelling enough to get past the grotesqueness and heavy-handed conceptual repetition; the simultaneous chaos and over-simplification.

This is a novel that, at least in the beginning, seems more interested in a concept than in an exploration; more focused on style than content. It's a bit like Kafka's Metamorphosis, but through a blurry megaphone. I didn't find the opening absurdity and relational and emotional twists and turns as engaging or exquisitely comedic. That said, I only read the first few chapters. So, I won't recommend or not recommend this book. Only to say, in my experience, it starts out with a bit of a bang that is also a bit of a fizzle, and it wasn't my cup of tea.

[Amara · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 ⭐️ - (italy | world book challenge) I devoured this in 36 minutes!!! Oh my god I loved this so much - the descriptions were intoxicating. Beautiful and sickening, this was honestly so shocking. The descriptions of the food of the carbonara with fresh fettuccine, the bianca pizza, the mortadella, the ricotta and the sweet sickly gelato were delightful and made my mouth water. I did not expect the author to go where she did but wow I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a sausage the same way So much commentary on women’s bodies and sex and the male gaze. Just so much to unpack. Honestly recommending to everyone I know because wtf.

[ceasura · Rating 3 out of 5]

very nice

[Becca Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book, mainly because the plot is a little bit weird and crazy. The main character has a more traditional part of her that is always trying to appease those around her, (especially men) and a more rebellious part of her where she really goes deep into her sensuous love of food and stuffs her face. She deals a lot with learning to accept herself and finding emotional fullness.

[gwen B · Rating 4 out of 5]

fin abominable...

[Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice, the Sausage’ (2003, tr. Catherine Petit and Paul Buck, 2006) was the debut novel of French writer Sophie Jabés and published in English by Dedalus Books as part of their Euro Shorts series. The idea of the series was that you could enjoy the book on the short trip between London and Paris via Eurostar. But for such a short work it packs much to digest.

From its biblical opening (‘In the beginning were Alice’s legs.’) we view the titular Alice as perfect. Those legs (‘Slim. Streamlined. First class. Aristocratic.’) are just part of a body so beautifully designed it gives all the men in Rome a hard-on. But touching is forbidden as Alice is reserving herself for her one and only, whenever he should appear.

But a meeting with her lothario father crushes her esteem when he tells her that she’s no Marilyn Monroe and that if you can’t be beautiful for men then you should open your legs and be nice for them. Her mother, equally unhelpful, confides that as long as she doesn’t starve and depilates she’ll have a good life.

In an innocent interpretation of such parental advice, so begins Alice’s sad, comical, and grotesque descent as she develops an appetite for food and fellatio, working in as prolific a manner as Garcia Marquez’s Eréndira.

There’s a hint of Kafka in Alice’s transformation, an inverse of the butterfly’s lifecycle as beauty turns into, well, a sausage. But for all its decadence and disgust, there’s delicious food on offer (and a glossary of Italian delights at the back) and the story of a woman on a path to self-destruction, whether it be her own choice or that of forces outside her control.

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[Billy Degge]

Sort of a pointedly second wave feminist take on The Metamorphosis. I liked it for what it was, though found its revelry in the bodily grotesque a bit dated at times and a bit, well, silly in others. Still, an interesting read though I'm not going to recommend it to anyone I know irl because I'm not completely insane.

[Rickie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gross

[Sofia Vitug · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ending got me like, wtf??

[Maddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Same vibes as The Metamorphosis <3

[FLaure · Rating 3 out of 5]

Descente aux enfers d'une jeune fille de 20 ans, Alice, qui se sait belle. Elle passe tout son temps à choyer son corps.
"Alice soignait ce corps avec un délice sans mélange."
Ma chronique complète : https://vie-quotidienne-de-flaure.blo...
"La femme" n'est pas dans son plus beau rôle.
Un bon moment de lecture, l'humour n'est pas absent ce qui en fait une lecture agréable.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose to read this book one day at the library. I had nothing to do and decided to choose something off one of the shelves and ended up picking this at one of the last shelves at the back of the library. From the first page I couldn't put it down, it's such an interesting book.

[Risa Amaya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this book in a whole hour, and the only words I can only say are- DAFUQ DID I JUST READ????????

[Norma · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit weird but not a bad book.