Rêvoir

by Hélène Cixous, Beverley Bie Brahic (translator)

A genre-defying account of confinement and its literary echoes through history.

As the pandemic sweeps through Paris in March 2020, the writer HC faces a stay in Paris or flee to the countryside? The weight of historical responses bears down on her—those of her ancestors and Jewish writers during moments of persecution.

Still uncertain, she flees to the country at the last moment, with her cats and her daughter, with her diaries and notebooks. What will she do here? Write? What will she write about? Can she write about the experience of being confined? She will write about her cats; every day she will observe their lives and take notes about how they cope with being housebound, and later, in the spring, with the outdoors.

Thucydides, Defoe, Camus, Kafka—she will compare her experiences with those of others who have been confined by malady or persecution. She will write of her mother, who fled impending disaster on many occasions and always kept a suitcase ready.

She too will endure. The important thing is to have a good death, surrounded by those she loves, not locked down in a hospital.
 

210 pages, Hardcover

Published October 6, 2024

About the author

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.

She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Reviews

[noémie]

j’ai moins aimé que ève s’évade
j’arrivais pas trop à m’accrocher au texte mais c pzut être un problème de concentration

[Alan M · Rating 4 out of 5]

'hence is me, hence is every inch of this body of mine that bears your imprint, this book whose every page was written, barred, corrected, inspired, weighed, revised by you, your hands, your lips'

Hélene Cixous writes like a dream; her prose has always inspired me, from her early work and her more academic pieces on language and sexuality, to the present. This lockdown novel, in which the central character HC decides to escape Paris and flee to the countryside, becomes a meditation on womanhood, on being a writer and on being a human being. Comparing her life with the lives of those who have come before - Defoe, Camus, Kafka - Cixous has written a compelling yet challenging piece. Not to everyone's taste, probably, but the work of a colossal talent and a giant of literature:

'Despite everything I'll write. The verb despitewrite, Kafka says.'

[Eden · Rating 3 out of 5]

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