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Ni un día
Ni un día (Premio Médicis 2002) es una reflexión sobre el deseo, rastreado por una narradora que se impone escribir cada día, durante cinco horas. También sobre la memoria y la evocación de ese mismo deseo sentido hacia otra mujer. Y aunque predomine un tono a veces elegíaco, melancólico, de búsqueda de las huellas del pasado, de constatación de la pérdida, en esta revisión del pasado encontramos igualmente una finísima ironía, numerosos guiños intertextuales a Rousseau, Stendhal, Proust… y continuas llamadas de atención al lector sobre el propio texto cargadas de humor que denotan la inteligencia creativa de Anne F Garréta. A propósito de estas cuestiones, nos pregunta Hermes Salceda en la introducción a esta obra singular: “¿cómo escribir sobre el deseo no normativo cuando uno se ajusta tan bien a la norma? Y tratándose de esta obra sobre todo, ¿con qué mirada acercarse, cómo leer el deseo no normativo, lésbico en este caso, cuando uno encaja en la norma?”. Muy bien pudiera ser este libro la respuesta.
De rabiosa actualidad por los cuatro ejes fundamentales que explora su temática (sexualidad, experimentación formal, feminismo y memoria), el acercamiento a estos temas que ofrece la novela no es nada superficial, a pesar de tratar temas tan en boga en la literatura de los últimos años. Su exploración es profunda y el resultado es una radiografía del estado de la cuestión en la sociedad occidental del siglo XXI.
En los tiempos que vivimos, actitudes vitales y artísticas como las de Anne F. Garréta son la prueba de que la tradición cultural de nada sirve si no es para avanzar cuestionándola y de que los constreñimientos que la realidad impone claman por convertirse en revulsivos y acicates del advenimiento de nuevas realidades.
De rabiosa actualidad por los cuatro ejes fundamentales que explora su temática (sexualidad, experimentación formal, feminismo y memoria), el acercamiento a estos temas que ofrece la novela no es nada superficial, a pesar de tratar temas tan en boga en la literatura de los últimos años. Su exploración es profunda y el resultado es una radiografía del estado de la cuestión en la sociedad occidental del siglo XXI.
En los tiempos que vivimos, actitudes vitales y artísticas como las de Anne F. Garréta son la prueba de que la tradición cultural de nada sirve si no es para avanzar cuestionándola y de que los constreñimientos que la realidad impone claman por convertirse en revulsivos y acicates del advenimiento de nuevas realidades.
149 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
55 people are currently reading
1929 people want to read
About the author
Anne Garréta
10 books91 followersAnne F. Garréta (born 1962) is a French novelist and a member of the experimental literary group Oulipo. A graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest, A***. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), tells the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994, and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won the Prix Médicis in 2002 for her novel Pas un jour. awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award—Georges Perec won in 1978).
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April 10, 2024A Blindness Brought on by Poststructural Theory
I found this book intensely annoying from the very first page.
Garreta is a member of Oulipo, and I understood from reviews that the book is experimental in an Oulipean sense. The reviews noted that she begins by setting out an Oulipean constraint, and then doesn't consistently follow it, which is an Oulipean trait. Her subject is all the women she has loved or desired, and one of her self-imposed constraints is that she'll write about a different woman each day for the course of the project.
She opens with an "Ante Scriptum," which begins with the dictum--common in poststructuralism, metafiction, and the Oulipo--that the project of writing is to "rid yourself of your self," meaning to demonstrate, in as many "intricate constructions" as possible, that the notion of the narrator is a fiction, and that the implied author is doubly so, that no self can be sleuthed behind the text. All these are commonplace beginnings.
What annoyed me was the way she positions herself (by which I mean both the author as she presents herself, and the implied author who can be deduced from the book without its metafictional frame) and her readers on that first page. She adopts a mock condescension:
"You [i.e., I] don't have the heart to tell them [the "few readers"] that no subject ever expresses itself in any narration. And besides, they would refuse to believe this terrifying bit of news--we're still punch drunk on our little selves." (p. 3)
Notionally, the readers still posit Anne Garréta behind the texts signed in her name, and are still "drunk" enough on their vanities to go on desiring stories of desire. Bravely, she volunteers to put herself right in the center of the practices in which she has no belief:
"So you [i.e., I] have resolved... to pretend to step out onto the slippery slope that seems so natural these days and to subject yourself [myself, and my readers] to the discipline of confessional writing... You will play at a very old game that has become the hobbyhorse of a modernity balking at radical disenchantment: confession..." (pp. 3-4)
This is annoying because the pose here is that the author/narrator has entirely subscribed to "radical disenchantment," but she's going to "play" with the idea of narrating her desires, as if desires were the key to "our subjectivity," as if the narrator in the text that follows actually existed as a subject, not to mention as a projection of the named author.
But this has to be entirely wrong. No reader I know, possibly excepting AI readers, is so thoroughly "disenchanted" that they do not see narrators as subjectivities, that they don't see representations of desire as attempts to elucidate subjectivity, that they don't understand narrators as intricately implicated with their authors. I like conceptual poetry, even after the fall of American conceptualism, but I do not fit the portrait Garréta paints so glibly and condescendingly.
For me, a first page like this one puts the author in question (and therefore also the narrator). I don't believe Garréta believes in the kind of disenchantment she claims. The truth has to be closer to what some reviewers have noted: this is a book about love and desire, and its degrees of fictionalization or constraint are not relevant to that fact. The reason Garréta sets rules for herself is to "play," as she says, but not in the way she intends it in the line I quoted. She's not "playing" by reconceptualizing old-fashioned narratives of desire as "intricate constructions." She's writing old-fashioned narratives of desire slightly deformed by playfully "intricate constructions."
I wrote all that before I read past the bottom of the second page. I thought it was important to register my absolute non-assent with regard to the opening voice of the book, and my possibly irreparable alienation from the narrative voice that the text s lightheartely and "playfully" proposes. I was an alienated reader from the outset.
*
Now I've read the entire book: twelve stories about desire, love, and love affairs; and a "Post Scriptum" in which the author again speaks for herself.
The "Ante Scriptum" continues with a surprisingly long list of self-imposed rules. In my enumeration:
1. "Not one day without a woman" (that is: each day she'll write about one love affair)
2. Strict fidelity the "the unwinding of memory" (no artificial composition)
3. Five hours per day, "no more, no less"
4. Seven days a week
5. Written in the order in which they come to mind
6. No pen (the book ends by acknowledging the Apple Macintosh)
7. No drafts or notebooks
8. No other rules, nothing other than memory
9. No fiction ("nor will you reconstruct [events] as they might have happened," p. 5)
The twelve stories ("Nights": ten women, a girl, and a Pontiac Grand Am, which she loves because its name reminds her of "grande ame" and "grande dame") are well observed, nicely composed, and wholly conventional. It is difficult to imagine a reader who could remain faithful to the "Ante Scriptum" while reading about seductions, drinking, and nightclubs. The only traces of the "Ante Scriptum" are the anonymized titles (for example "B*," "D*") and the square-bracketed number at the end of each "Night."
But my annoyance returned in full force in the "Post Scriptum," not because it begins by excusing the author's lapses from her various rules (that is obvious early on, and it's announced on the back cover), and not because she admits at least one of the twelve stories is a fiction (that does have consequences for how the book is read, as she notes), but because she returns to her idea of avoiding the fiction of subjectivity and "the idolatry of desire" and spends the last five pages on an unironic defense of her unavoidable complicity in the "empire" of desire. It turns out she remains serious about writing differently, not falling for the fiction of fiction's veracity or psychological truth, not being duped by the production of subjectivity -- and yet she thinks that the two framing essays are enough to call the twelve "Nights" into question. Regarding this most important rule, the essays have nothing to say to a reading of the "Nights."
What lack of self-awareness, what hypnosis brought on by a lifetime of literary theory, what confidence bolstered by uncritical praise, combined to produce this raw juxtaposition of poststructural theory and perfectly ordinary storytelling?
I found this book intensely annoying from the very first page.
Garreta is a member of Oulipo, and I understood from reviews that the book is experimental in an Oulipean sense. The reviews noted that she begins by setting out an Oulipean constraint, and then doesn't consistently follow it, which is an Oulipean trait. Her subject is all the women she has loved or desired, and one of her self-imposed constraints is that she'll write about a different woman each day for the course of the project.
She opens with an "Ante Scriptum," which begins with the dictum--common in poststructuralism, metafiction, and the Oulipo--that the project of writing is to "rid yourself of your self," meaning to demonstrate, in as many "intricate constructions" as possible, that the notion of the narrator is a fiction, and that the implied author is doubly so, that no self can be sleuthed behind the text. All these are commonplace beginnings.
What annoyed me was the way she positions herself (by which I mean both the author as she presents herself, and the implied author who can be deduced from the book without its metafictional frame) and her readers on that first page. She adopts a mock condescension:
"You [i.e., I] don't have the heart to tell them [the "few readers"] that no subject ever expresses itself in any narration. And besides, they would refuse to believe this terrifying bit of news--we're still punch drunk on our little selves." (p. 3)
Notionally, the readers still posit Anne Garréta behind the texts signed in her name, and are still "drunk" enough on their vanities to go on desiring stories of desire. Bravely, she volunteers to put herself right in the center of the practices in which she has no belief:
"So you [i.e., I] have resolved... to pretend to step out onto the slippery slope that seems so natural these days and to subject yourself [myself, and my readers] to the discipline of confessional writing... You will play at a very old game that has become the hobbyhorse of a modernity balking at radical disenchantment: confession..." (pp. 3-4)
This is annoying because the pose here is that the author/narrator has entirely subscribed to "radical disenchantment," but she's going to "play" with the idea of narrating her desires, as if desires were the key to "our subjectivity," as if the narrator in the text that follows actually existed as a subject, not to mention as a projection of the named author.
But this has to be entirely wrong. No reader I know, possibly excepting AI readers, is so thoroughly "disenchanted" that they do not see narrators as subjectivities, that they don't see representations of desire as attempts to elucidate subjectivity, that they don't understand narrators as intricately implicated with their authors. I like conceptual poetry, even after the fall of American conceptualism, but I do not fit the portrait Garréta paints so glibly and condescendingly.
For me, a first page like this one puts the author in question (and therefore also the narrator). I don't believe Garréta believes in the kind of disenchantment she claims. The truth has to be closer to what some reviewers have noted: this is a book about love and desire, and its degrees of fictionalization or constraint are not relevant to that fact. The reason Garréta sets rules for herself is to "play," as she says, but not in the way she intends it in the line I quoted. She's not "playing" by reconceptualizing old-fashioned narratives of desire as "intricate constructions." She's writing old-fashioned narratives of desire slightly deformed by playfully "intricate constructions."
I wrote all that before I read past the bottom of the second page. I thought it was important to register my absolute non-assent with regard to the opening voice of the book, and my possibly irreparable alienation from the narrative voice that the text s lightheartely and "playfully" proposes. I was an alienated reader from the outset.
*
Now I've read the entire book: twelve stories about desire, love, and love affairs; and a "Post Scriptum" in which the author again speaks for herself.
The "Ante Scriptum" continues with a surprisingly long list of self-imposed rules. In my enumeration:
1. "Not one day without a woman" (that is: each day she'll write about one love affair)
2. Strict fidelity the "the unwinding of memory" (no artificial composition)
3. Five hours per day, "no more, no less"
4. Seven days a week
5. Written in the order in which they come to mind
6. No pen (the book ends by acknowledging the Apple Macintosh)
7. No drafts or notebooks
8. No other rules, nothing other than memory
9. No fiction ("nor will you reconstruct [events] as they might have happened," p. 5)
The twelve stories ("Nights": ten women, a girl, and a Pontiac Grand Am, which she loves because its name reminds her of "grande ame" and "grande dame") are well observed, nicely composed, and wholly conventional. It is difficult to imagine a reader who could remain faithful to the "Ante Scriptum" while reading about seductions, drinking, and nightclubs. The only traces of the "Ante Scriptum" are the anonymized titles (for example "B*," "D*") and the square-bracketed number at the end of each "Night."
But my annoyance returned in full force in the "Post Scriptum," not because it begins by excusing the author's lapses from her various rules (that is obvious early on, and it's announced on the back cover), and not because she admits at least one of the twelve stories is a fiction (that does have consequences for how the book is read, as she notes), but because she returns to her idea of avoiding the fiction of subjectivity and "the idolatry of desire" and spends the last five pages on an unironic defense of her unavoidable complicity in the "empire" of desire. It turns out she remains serious about writing differently, not falling for the fiction of fiction's veracity or psychological truth, not being duped by the production of subjectivity -- and yet she thinks that the two framing essays are enough to call the twelve "Nights" into question. Regarding this most important rule, the essays have nothing to say to a reading of the "Nights."
What lack of self-awareness, what hypnosis brought on by a lifetime of literary theory, what confidence bolstered by uncritical praise, combined to produce this raw juxtaposition of poststructural theory and perfectly ordinary storytelling?
October 5, 2017
Very sexy, very French. The narrator sets herself the task of daily free-writing about a different woman she has lusted after, and the results prove a lot more gorgeous and interesting than one might expect. An Afterword adds a dazzling layer of complexity, turning the whole into a fascinating reflection on form and fiction.
May 16, 2022
A brief memoir or confession recalling women the narrator has known, set out in an Oulipian restraint. Or is it something else entirely? The writing loops, swerves, and crackles. Translation by Emma Ramadan and Garréta. Longer review to come. Recommended.
July 26, 2023
i'm sorry but french novelists are addicted to never serving
June 29, 2017
A charming confection from a lesser-known Oulipian rising to prominence on the world stage, thanks to Deep Vellum Press. Whip-smart (in the S&M sense), wryly hilarious, elegantly lyrical, and drolly observant, this novella makes a fine addition to the Oulipian canon.
December 15, 2021
This is a great little one hour (max) read that will defy your expectations in some very interesting ways. For a memoir (maybe?) in translation, which I can sometimes find clunky and more interested in the original words rather than intent of the author, this felt as though it was meant to be readable, perhaps because the author herself assisted with the translation.
So the parameters are that the author will spend one night writing about a women who has loved her or whom she has loved. She has decided to write them in the order in which they occur. Then arrange them alphabetically. Five hours for each person over the course of twelve days.
Except then they're chronological. And written over the course of six months. And one of them isn't even real.
Written in second person, the author chides herself throughout, and in one instance slips into an "I" instead of a "you" and then catches the slip, in a way that stopped me in my reading tracks. Did this person mean more than the others? Or, after finishing the book, was this the account that was falsified? The Post Scriptum turns everything on its head, and is brilliantly written as both apology and taunt.
Also, it has this line it in, which is officially one of my life's mottos: For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.
Full Review: https://www.glbtrt.ala.org/reviews/bo...
So the parameters are that the author will spend one night writing about a women who has loved her or whom she has loved. She has decided to write them in the order in which they occur. Then arrange them alphabetically. Five hours for each person over the course of twelve days.
Except then they're chronological. And written over the course of six months. And one of them isn't even real.
Written in second person, the author chides herself throughout, and in one instance slips into an "I" instead of a "you" and then catches the slip, in a way that stopped me in my reading tracks. Did this person mean more than the others? Or, after finishing the book, was this the account that was falsified? The Post Scriptum turns everything on its head, and is brilliantly written as both apology and taunt.
Also, it has this line it in, which is officially one of my life's mottos: For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.
Full Review: https://www.glbtrt.ala.org/reviews/bo...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 3, 2020
3 stars. It was definitely me
Maybe third time is the charm? No?
Maybe third time is the charm? No?
June 4, 2024
«La manera de preservar lo que uno ama es devaluándolo abiertamente para que nadie piense en adueñarse de él (…) Profanar lo que tenemos de sagrado para no ser su rehén».
En esta obra premiada (Médici de 2002), Anne realiza un viaje nostálgico por sus experiencias en el ámbito romántico y se las relata a sí misma en un tono reflexivo para teorizar acerca del deseo. No ya por el que la ha asfixiado o solo han experimentado otras mujeres hacia ella, sino por el que representa el engranaje de la máquina capitalista y su mayor compinche: la publicidad. Leyéndolo me he acordado de cuando buceé en un foro de personas asexuales y me topé con la misma reflexión que plantea ahora Anne, solo que sin tintes intelectuales: los anuncios —de perfumes, por ejemplo— no te venden el deseo de ser rico, te venden el deseo de ser deseado, que es lo que finalmente mueve el mundo.
Anne tiene un estilo filosófico que se habría beneficiado de una expresión escrita menos sobrecargada. Siempre he pensado que cuando la idea es complicada, es preferible facilitar su comprensión prescindiendo de parafernalias discursivas; también que el relato de experiencias íntimas no requiere de lenguajes floridos. Conclusiones que podrían haber resultado iluminadoras se diluyen en el uso excesivo de metáforas y en las interminables ristras de adjetivos. Empiezas a leer con interés, pero te vas cansando a medida que avanzas. Claro que tratándose de una autora oulipiana del estilo de Italo Calvino no podía esperarse menos que un laberinto de palabras. Merece la pena, aun así, familiarizarse con la biografía, la persona y los logros de Anne F. Garréta.
En esta obra premiada (Médici de 2002), Anne realiza un viaje nostálgico por sus experiencias en el ámbito romántico y se las relata a sí misma en un tono reflexivo para teorizar acerca del deseo. No ya por el que la ha asfixiado o solo han experimentado otras mujeres hacia ella, sino por el que representa el engranaje de la máquina capitalista y su mayor compinche: la publicidad. Leyéndolo me he acordado de cuando buceé en un foro de personas asexuales y me topé con la misma reflexión que plantea ahora Anne, solo que sin tintes intelectuales: los anuncios —de perfumes, por ejemplo— no te venden el deseo de ser rico, te venden el deseo de ser deseado, que es lo que finalmente mueve el mundo.
Anne tiene un estilo filosófico que se habría beneficiado de una expresión escrita menos sobrecargada. Siempre he pensado que cuando la idea es complicada, es preferible facilitar su comprensión prescindiendo de parafernalias discursivas; también que el relato de experiencias íntimas no requiere de lenguajes floridos. Conclusiones que podrían haber resultado iluminadoras se diluyen en el uso excesivo de metáforas y en las interminables ristras de adjetivos. Empiezas a leer con interés, pero te vas cansando a medida que avanzas. Claro que tratándose de una autora oulipiana del estilo de Italo Calvino no podía esperarse menos que un laberinto de palabras. Merece la pena, aun así, familiarizarse con la biografía, la persona y los logros de Anne F. Garréta.
October 9, 2018
A non oulipo narrative by a " young' oulipo author detailing some of her loves, lusts, and lost connections. But haha the joke,s on is so be sure and read the afterword. Prize winning translated from the French and deep ellum published it.
October 28, 2017
★★★★☆ (4/5)
A non-fiction veiled fictitiously. Anne Garréta’s stunning prose brings to life the mind of a writer, mired in an upheaval of a personal project where she intends to deliberate on past infatuations. We come across a myriad of unknown love interests, crushes, secret admirers and objects of affections; delve into the writers psyche of emotional attachments, value of arts and sentiments in life. The structure of prose is terse, given the writers Oulipian affiliations, which threads from one end to another often leaving massive blanks in the midst. These blanks are meant to be filled in by the reader, as suggested by the Afterword. In “Not One Day” Garréta manages to fuse fiction with truth so much so that the reader cannot decipher the two apart...and neither can the writer.
A selections of favourite passages from the book
• What’s to be done with our inclinations? Why not write something different, differently than you usually do? Once more, but with a new twist, rid yourself of your self. Shed the accoutrements of this disentangling, keep at bay a little longer, if you can, who you think you are. Since you can no longer conceive of writing except in long and intricate constructions, isn’t it time to go against the grain
• All we seem to do nowadays is tell and retell the stories of our lives
• Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object
• From day to day, you would have had nothing to report: nothing ever happens to you except in remembering. You only grasp the moment in distant memory, once oblivion has given things, beings, events, the density that they never have in the broad evanescence of daylight
• In this regard, desire and pain are alike—your accident taught you this. Only when they take you by surprise do they get out of hand
• Memory of a body: inscribed in a given space, anchored in light
• You witnessed, powerless, motionless, your own colonization by an inexplicable and obscene desire that your willpower was failing to keep in check, to contain, to purge
• the calm of the night, the weightlessness of the air, the layers of light vacillating all around; the complicity brought on by long silences, solitude, altitude, the distant horizon?
• But here’s the paradox: it’s in fleeing before the invasion of material life, multiplying the exiles, the trips when you rejoiced at the thought of casting everything off, that you find yourself once more multiplying the constraints. You buy—for you wouldn’t be able to resist the desire of a volume that promises flights of fancy or thought—books you can never resolve to leave behind
• We merely trade one blindness for another. For lack of the common blindness, we will let a singular lucidity blind us
• Here we go. We’re floating together in the warm bath of self revelations and secrets disclosed in the fiction of hidden faces
• he had seen shores empty of inhabitants looking at seas empty of ships, and whose hosts, to ward off the anxiety of these infinite spaces they are too few to populate, strive to cover up under sprawling suburbs, distraught metropolises, shopping malls rolled out over acres and acres, a blanket of concrete, parking lots, ramps, bypasses, asphalt. Lay the foundation to cement our disappearance, quickly, for its grip, imminent, threatens
• The friendship had probably, from the start, been built on a basis of subtle desire, of a potential desire that good sense, affinity, tenderness had managed to tame, divert, shape into something else.
• The order of what ensued is vague. There is no time in your memory, nothing but places and between them passages that open only to close again
• There is no one to resuscitate, and it’s because the memory is still alive that it resists autopsy and decimation over the course of a story.
• You should have suspected it at the first word written tonight. You should have, in rereading that correspondence a few months ago, understood it all. The dialect in which you wrote to each other is the dialect of all your loves: a chimera of French and English, strewn with bilingual wordplay, vertigos of language, trepidation over meaning
• You had forgotten that the point of this instruction was never to instill an affinity for the subject but to make it into a pure instrument of selection
• The mystery of her identity, the search for signs, the hermeneutic passion it inspired in you, made that semester of self-defense the most arousing erotic experience of your life. An eroticism that was all the more strange since it never managed to fasten itself or settle on any one body, but instead was bound to all of them, and because it was fluid, vacillating, drove you to pay to each of them an intense and infinite attention
• Friendship seems to you today the most difficult thing in the world. You attempt it, and almost always doubt its reality
• Our habits prompt our judgments more than our tastes do
• Ironic aporia of sovereignty: Mustn’t we get down on our knees to ascend to the throne?
• As for writing every day or even every night, that was rather optimistic… Did you really bank on so easily curing yourself of your cardinal vice—procrastination?
• Generating randomness exceeds the forces of the human mind: it takes machines. The animal exudes sense and determination like it pisses, like it speaks, like it breathe
• Hadn’t you taken care that these stories be abstract enough to prevent a positive identification of their subjects?
• But who’s to say that your critique of desire isn’t just another tool of its empire?
A non-fiction veiled fictitiously. Anne Garréta’s stunning prose brings to life the mind of a writer, mired in an upheaval of a personal project where she intends to deliberate on past infatuations. We come across a myriad of unknown love interests, crushes, secret admirers and objects of affections; delve into the writers psyche of emotional attachments, value of arts and sentiments in life. The structure of prose is terse, given the writers Oulipian affiliations, which threads from one end to another often leaving massive blanks in the midst. These blanks are meant to be filled in by the reader, as suggested by the Afterword. In “Not One Day” Garréta manages to fuse fiction with truth so much so that the reader cannot decipher the two apart...and neither can the writer.
A selections of favourite passages from the book
• What’s to be done with our inclinations? Why not write something different, differently than you usually do? Once more, but with a new twist, rid yourself of your self. Shed the accoutrements of this disentangling, keep at bay a little longer, if you can, who you think you are. Since you can no longer conceive of writing except in long and intricate constructions, isn’t it time to go against the grain
• All we seem to do nowadays is tell and retell the stories of our lives
• Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object
• From day to day, you would have had nothing to report: nothing ever happens to you except in remembering. You only grasp the moment in distant memory, once oblivion has given things, beings, events, the density that they never have in the broad evanescence of daylight
• In this regard, desire and pain are alike—your accident taught you this. Only when they take you by surprise do they get out of hand
• Memory of a body: inscribed in a given space, anchored in light
• You witnessed, powerless, motionless, your own colonization by an inexplicable and obscene desire that your willpower was failing to keep in check, to contain, to purge
• the calm of the night, the weightlessness of the air, the layers of light vacillating all around; the complicity brought on by long silences, solitude, altitude, the distant horizon?
• But here’s the paradox: it’s in fleeing before the invasion of material life, multiplying the exiles, the trips when you rejoiced at the thought of casting everything off, that you find yourself once more multiplying the constraints. You buy—for you wouldn’t be able to resist the desire of a volume that promises flights of fancy or thought—books you can never resolve to leave behind
• We merely trade one blindness for another. For lack of the common blindness, we will let a singular lucidity blind us
• Here we go. We’re floating together in the warm bath of self revelations and secrets disclosed in the fiction of hidden faces
• he had seen shores empty of inhabitants looking at seas empty of ships, and whose hosts, to ward off the anxiety of these infinite spaces they are too few to populate, strive to cover up under sprawling suburbs, distraught metropolises, shopping malls rolled out over acres and acres, a blanket of concrete, parking lots, ramps, bypasses, asphalt. Lay the foundation to cement our disappearance, quickly, for its grip, imminent, threatens
• The friendship had probably, from the start, been built on a basis of subtle desire, of a potential desire that good sense, affinity, tenderness had managed to tame, divert, shape into something else.
• The order of what ensued is vague. There is no time in your memory, nothing but places and between them passages that open only to close again
• There is no one to resuscitate, and it’s because the memory is still alive that it resists autopsy and decimation over the course of a story.
• You should have suspected it at the first word written tonight. You should have, in rereading that correspondence a few months ago, understood it all. The dialect in which you wrote to each other is the dialect of all your loves: a chimera of French and English, strewn with bilingual wordplay, vertigos of language, trepidation over meaning
• You had forgotten that the point of this instruction was never to instill an affinity for the subject but to make it into a pure instrument of selection
• The mystery of her identity, the search for signs, the hermeneutic passion it inspired in you, made that semester of self-defense the most arousing erotic experience of your life. An eroticism that was all the more strange since it never managed to fasten itself or settle on any one body, but instead was bound to all of them, and because it was fluid, vacillating, drove you to pay to each of them an intense and infinite attention
• Friendship seems to you today the most difficult thing in the world. You attempt it, and almost always doubt its reality
• Our habits prompt our judgments more than our tastes do
• Ironic aporia of sovereignty: Mustn’t we get down on our knees to ascend to the throne?
• As for writing every day or even every night, that was rather optimistic… Did you really bank on so easily curing yourself of your cardinal vice—procrastination?
• Generating randomness exceeds the forces of the human mind: it takes machines. The animal exudes sense and determination like it pisses, like it speaks, like it breathe
• Hadn’t you taken care that these stories be abstract enough to prevent a positive identification of their subjects?
• But who’s to say that your critique of desire isn’t just another tool of its empire?
March 29, 2021
Anne Garréta playfully and skillfully weaves a narration defying classification. She sets out ground rules in the beginning for herself to tell the story of desire. Each chapter is about a woman love, lover, fantasy, memory, and desire itself. The end result lives somewhere between fiction, memoir, essay, and short story, challenging my preconceptions as a reader and beautifully evoking the hazy domain of memory.
April 9, 2023
Obsessed with this book!!
December 29, 2021
as a sad bitch who hates math, not all of oulipian output is interesting to me, and that is perfectly fine. i don’t believe most of that work was written with a reader in mind - it’s the process, not the product, which i can respect as someone who also loves rigid constraints in her work. at the same time, there is a special intimacy that comes from being so bare and transparent about the writing process in the very fabric of the work - as a reader, it creates a connection with the writer i am not allowed in writing that follows no such scaffolding and prefers that i see the illusion of a final draft.
as such, this one just absolutely does it for me in every possible way. the constraint produces a rawness that only builds upon what is already intensely relatable stuff - i, too, have measured my stupid little life in the women that have and have not made up important portions of it, and i think one HAS to force themselves to sit down every day and barrel through these memories in order to pay tribute.
sphinx made less of an impact on me bc i read it in 2020 when the central device is not very revolutionary or shocking and was also spoiled to me before i began the book. i put this one off for too long as a result. big mistake. i love it.
as such, this one just absolutely does it for me in every possible way. the constraint produces a rawness that only builds upon what is already intensely relatable stuff - i, too, have measured my stupid little life in the women that have and have not made up important portions of it, and i think one HAS to force themselves to sit down every day and barrel through these memories in order to pay tribute.
sphinx made less of an impact on me bc i read it in 2020 when the central device is not very revolutionary or shocking and was also spoiled to me before i began the book. i put this one off for too long as a result. big mistake. i love it.
August 2, 2017
Was not as into this as her previous book; this really came across as an exercise both in device and diction, this seemed wordy for the sake of wordiness and not for any other reason, and did not enhance my enjoyment of the book. Shame, but I'll definitely pick up her next.
February 27, 2022
The sapphics may love this, but I couldn't bring myself to like the narrator, who wasn't interesting but wrote from a place of ill-defined superiority complex. Also, she wrote about sex as if she'd never had it but imagined it.
July 5, 2017
This book is an interesting exploration of desire. It's use of description is quite eloquent. This book is well written and thoughtful. You can tell the author is stretching herself by sharing.
July 29, 2024
“Not One Day” by Anne Garréta is an intimate exploration into desire and an inquiry into the power desire holds over our bodies, minds, and beliefs.
Upon reading the first chapter, I was enraptured by Garréta’s voice: sharp, witty, dry, sarcastic, and yet tender. As Garréta weaves her stories onto the page, her writing itself elicits pleasure and desire; her sentences stretch and expand into pure poetry.
I was also in awe of the translation itself and extremely taken by how Emma Ramadan accomplished to deliver (what I can only imagine to be) the fluidity, movement, poetry, and heart of the original French text. As we see Garréta open up (or fail to open up) while recounting her memories, “Not One Day” feels like an incredibly human text. As much as humor, joy, loss, and heartbreak are felt across this text, the feeling I cling to most at the end is loneliness.
While centered primarily on sexual lust and the performance of courtship, I appreciate how Garréta widens the scope of her discussion of desire. For desire is also about our personal motivations and sense of self, not to mention a weapon used against us in a world driven by capitalism. What we also learn is that shame around particular desires can be just as revealing as desire itself.
“Not One Day” is a text that by the end, Garréta herself cannot tell whether she is grateful to have written. Does desire lose its purity and meaning when it is showcased for all to see? Or is a revelation of desire an honest look into all that we are?
Garréta’s narration is an interesting one to follow. Firstly, her accounts raise questions for me about how much of queer desire is inextricably tied to versus broken free from patriarchy and the male gaze. Secondly, as we learn in the end, Garréta’s voice is not to be trusted. (Although this does inspire an excitement towards rereading the text and spotting the fiction in her words) There are judgements Garréta makes that are disagreeable, and feel biased (as the world in which we inhabit across “Not One Day” feels primarily white, academic, and middle/upper class). However, I stayed hanging onto every word, captured by way Garréta constructs each narrative. It is a testament to how the text still feels honest even if we consciously know it is not. (Which in it of itself raises questions about how we measure authenticity and honesty)
I mentioned earlier how human Garréta’s text feels. It is no more so than at the end when she unveils her tricks, her deceit, and her failures to the reader. I suppose it is refreshing to know the writers we marvel get just as frusturated at themselves and fall short of their goals as we do. For we always desire (even when the subject makes clear that they have not fully given themselves away in their text) to find bits of ourselves in other people. Because ultimately, therein lies a comfort (regardless of how short lived that comfort may be) or knowing you are not alone.
Desire can be all-consuming, passionate, and euphoric, yet an equally mundane, painful, and lonely path.
Upon reading the first chapter, I was enraptured by Garréta’s voice: sharp, witty, dry, sarcastic, and yet tender. As Garréta weaves her stories onto the page, her writing itself elicits pleasure and desire; her sentences stretch and expand into pure poetry.
I was also in awe of the translation itself and extremely taken by how Emma Ramadan accomplished to deliver (what I can only imagine to be) the fluidity, movement, poetry, and heart of the original French text. As we see Garréta open up (or fail to open up) while recounting her memories, “Not One Day” feels like an incredibly human text. As much as humor, joy, loss, and heartbreak are felt across this text, the feeling I cling to most at the end is loneliness.
While centered primarily on sexual lust and the performance of courtship, I appreciate how Garréta widens the scope of her discussion of desire. For desire is also about our personal motivations and sense of self, not to mention a weapon used against us in a world driven by capitalism. What we also learn is that shame around particular desires can be just as revealing as desire itself.
“Not One Day” is a text that by the end, Garréta herself cannot tell whether she is grateful to have written. Does desire lose its purity and meaning when it is showcased for all to see? Or is a revelation of desire an honest look into all that we are?
Garréta’s narration is an interesting one to follow. Firstly, her accounts raise questions for me about how much of queer desire is inextricably tied to versus broken free from patriarchy and the male gaze. Secondly, as we learn in the end, Garréta’s voice is not to be trusted. (Although this does inspire an excitement towards rereading the text and spotting the fiction in her words) There are judgements Garréta makes that are disagreeable, and feel biased (as the world in which we inhabit across “Not One Day” feels primarily white, academic, and middle/upper class). However, I stayed hanging onto every word, captured by way Garréta constructs each narrative. It is a testament to how the text still feels honest even if we consciously know it is not. (Which in it of itself raises questions about how we measure authenticity and honesty)
I mentioned earlier how human Garréta’s text feels. It is no more so than at the end when she unveils her tricks, her deceit, and her failures to the reader. I suppose it is refreshing to know the writers we marvel get just as frusturated at themselves and fall short of their goals as we do. For we always desire (even when the subject makes clear that they have not fully given themselves away in their text) to find bits of ourselves in other people. Because ultimately, therein lies a comfort (regardless of how short lived that comfort may be) or knowing you are not alone.
Desire can be all-consuming, passionate, and euphoric, yet an equally mundane, painful, and lonely path.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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May 28, 2024recommended to me by my best friend, this book did not disappoint. However I would love to read it in a class/gay book club cause it's so dense. Sometimes it infuriated me with its pretension but I loved how no-nonsense the premise is.
March 8, 2025
Very very cool exercise in writing - Garréta sets out to write for 5 hours each morning, each day reflecting on past desire. It’s reads like a very beautiful and well written diary. Some passages made my jaw drop. Overall I enjoyed it.
January 24, 2018
I can't say I liked this book but read it for my first French-American book club meeting in New York this evening. I read it in French and am curious to find out how the English version was perceived. The topic (sex, desire...) and writing style (Oulipian writing) are interesting but left me cold. Maybe I will have a different view after the book club discussion. Stay tuned (or not).
November 21, 2019
In many ways this is a failed experiment with one little twist that became something nearly perfect. It's not a book to devour but to savor. My only regret is not reading it more slowly.
February 1, 2019
A brief excerpted passage of Anne F. Garréta's prose forcefully commanded my interest earlier this month whilst reading Luc Sante's piece in the current HARPER'S on the Oulipo group and a new anthology of miscellany from writers operating under its banner. Fast forward: I have read two Garréta novels in two days and this is my second review. Oulipo. Ouvroir de littérature potentielle. Workshop of Potential Literature. The idea behind Oulipo was to consolidate a group of artists whose mandate was to use mathematical and other formula to generate literary compositions. As such, these potential literatures were literatures beholden to generative constraints. Garréta was the first woman ever invited to join Oulipo and the first member born after the group set up shop. Her debut novel, the fantastically accomplished SPHINX, which I read and reviewed yesterday, was published in 1986, before she was a member of Oulipo, but bears all the hallmarks of a fully-ratified contribution. SPHINX is engineered from a constraint that makes it both a groundbreaking work of generqueer literature and an impressive feat: it tells a love story to whose two central participants no gender is allocated, tricky to pull of especially in the original French, a language whose grammar is intricately gendered. NOT ONE DAY is a later work. A number of novels came between these two. I am especially interested in the one about a serial killer who preys on characters from Proust. NOT ONE DAY was written on "Apple Macintosh machines, July 19th 2000--November 19th 2001," specificities regarding the location and pockets of time in which it was composed central to its foundational set of constraints. It was published sixteen years after SPHINX and finds what I sensed to be a modality of wisdom hinted at in the earlier novel in full, resplendent flower. If SPHINX formulated an amorous relationship unmoored from fixed gender binaries but nonetheless imperiled by inflexible polarities of dominance and subjection, NOT ONE DAY reflects upon years and many lovers, elaborating a "rhetoric of desire," revealing an author who has found herself in variegated roles insofar as her couplings (and close calls) have been concerned, and who has come to possess a fairly untroubled grasp of the sublime tenuousness of human connection, inflamed by our drives. Both books made me think of Roland Barthes' A LOVER'S DISCOURSE, SPHINX in the passages where the author presents what I called in my review of that book a "profusion and enumeration of rites of amorous agony," NOT ONE DAY more comprehensively, presenting as it does a "stammering alphabet of desire." NOT ONE DAY also made me think of Chantal Akerman's 1982 film TOUTE UNE NUIT, a film depicting multiple fragmentary encounters between numerous pairs of lovers whose title its resembles. In the "Ante Scriptum" which prefaces NOT ONE DAY, the author lays out the contours of the project she has set for herself: she is to spend five hours on each brief section over a set span of time, not using notes or in any way preparing things in advance, working solely from memory and in-the-moment inspiration, in order to record reminiscences on either lovers, women she desired, or women who desired her. The sections are to be written in no proscribed order, merely as things come to her, the women depicted in each given a brief code name (E*, D*, Z*, etc.), the sections finally arranged alphabetically by name of corresponding female subject. The sections are named for the night they were written in the sequence of composition, but appear in a different order, hence the scrambled index at the front of the book. This chain of interlocking vignettes, uncovered from memory, consequently invoke philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of the perpetually modifying memory chain. Memory and desire are the central elements here, a fact repeatedly addressed explicitly: “Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object.” The ten sections of reminiscence are beautifully crafted and invigorating, filled to the brim with indelible, poignant, sometimes irreverent prose, such that endeavoring to quote them almost seems fruitless because ... where does one stop? One passage I love and would like to quote pertains to an inexpert seduction at the hands of a married nominally heterosexual female writer. Garréta riffs on the idea that “a novel is like a car: any amateur mechanic knows upon initial inspection the type, its most common pathologies, and the structure of its engine. There are a few common models, a minuscule amount of rare ones that force you to revise your understanding, oblige you to dismantle them completely to understand their workings. We encounter more family sedans on the roads of literature than Ferraris or prototypes.” This ends up serving as prelude to her making love to the lady writer who is herself subsequently described as a kind of mechanical doll. What else is an Oulipo writer but a kind of sophisticated mechanic? Each section depicts a different kind of relationship with its own autonomous dynamic, precipitating its own species of ecstasy, deadlock, discovery, or indignity. One section has nothing to do with another woman, focusing on desire in relation to Garréta's love affair with American highways, which I can relate to as as a Canadian who has his own abiding passion for the long distance North American drive (not to mention road movies). The whole book is written in the second person, Garréta writing about herself as "you," a tactic which situates her as analysand--“nothing but you and you playing against yourself—are you not your best adversary?—at the ancient and unreasonable game of analysis”--but also serves to create an intimate enmeshment with the reader, the other pertinent "you" in the scenario at hand. The subject is not a subject. Je est autre. Each of us is a whole population situated in assemblages of intertwined populations. "You" is a "reader, silent, who isn’t even a person, at best the signifier of one…” The term Deleuze and Guttari used to designated the porous population that each of us constitutes is "haecceity," a beautiful word. There is no subject. There is desire and memory. We are not stretching things when we invoke Barthes, Henri Bergson, and Deleuze-Guttari. This is a literature steeped in theory, especially semiotics and hermeneutics, declarative as such. In the final section, "Post Scriptum," a sly Afterword that mischievously pulls rugs out from under us and jabs obstructions through our spokes, all the while riffing gloriously, we are almost certainly asked at one point to remember Bataille and are positively inarguably presented with Lacan's "object petit a," spelled out bluntly comme ça. "Post Scriptum" is the icing on the cake, a delectation. SPHINX was a work attuned to the lover's agonies and the torments of impossible attachment. NOT ONE DAY knows life, has lived in up and down and side to side, sometimes agile, sometimes endearingly clumsy, and it knows what a person needs to know: it's all gravy, worthy of devotional praise, because nothing is at stake, the beauty of it all being that nobody gets out alive. I like to think of myself as a man who has endured cataclysmic codependent dissolution and attained wisdom at the other end of travail. I remember my past lovers with the same dignified earnestness and puckish irony as does Garréta hers. Lamentation has become a dish only rarely served in my condo. I find nothing less attractive in others than self-pity. Why would I give myself special dispensation as regards indulgence in same? I either live a post-sex life or I am on hiatus. Literature and art are my earthly Valhalla. Post-sex? Well, I have been known to moderately appreciate the onanistic pleasures of pornography. I take from "Post Scriptum" that Garréta might not strictly approve of my occasional streaming of porn, but I know she would get it. Shrug. Desire is formidable in a body, like memory, persistent, it doesn't stop flowing until the blood does.
May 22, 2019
This book has found its way into the position of one of my all time favorites! I’ve only read the English translation, but you can feel the phantom French poetics in the writing of the book. Such a fantastic take on the genre of the memoir and an incredible commentary on the nature of truth vs. fiction.
December 8, 2017
[4.5/5] A relatively breezy experimental text with an Oulipian constraint that doesn't block its accessibility and a goal that finds the narrator turning over the theme in surprising ways.
March 11, 2024
reads better in french
December 28, 2022
[3.5 stars rounded down]
This book is a little exhausting to read. Hence why it took me six months to complete.
I really enjoy the project of this book. Not One Day is a confessional that details a series of women the author has loved or desired over the course of her life. Each chapter very much reads like a snapshot of one specific moment in time. There isn't much context given for women that Garréta knew longer than one day (or night).
The truly frustrating part of this book was the writing, but it was also the best part? At times, the writing is beautiful and evocative and poetic. Other times, it's extremely overwrought and overwritten, with so many different ideas in one sentence or paragraph that it's confusing to follow what's happening. There are also tangents that the author goes on, very stream of consciousness, that took me out of the moment.
As much as I enjoyed the project of this book, I'm unsure how successful it was for me, as a reader. Some sections I quite liked. My favorite section was about a car and landscapes and traveling--Garréta's writing really shone in that chapter.
There were some moments when I was left wondering if Garréta even likes women, because she spoke of them so disparagingly at times. It felt a little misogynistic in some chapters, or at the very least stereotypical and unfair. This book was also written in 2002, so some of the language is dated and not what we would necessarily say these days.
A mixed bag, overall.
This book is a little exhausting to read. Hence why it took me six months to complete.
I really enjoy the project of this book. Not One Day is a confessional that details a series of women the author has loved or desired over the course of her life. Each chapter very much reads like a snapshot of one specific moment in time. There isn't much context given for women that Garréta knew longer than one day (or night).
The truly frustrating part of this book was the writing, but it was also the best part? At times, the writing is beautiful and evocative and poetic. Other times, it's extremely overwrought and overwritten, with so many different ideas in one sentence or paragraph that it's confusing to follow what's happening. There are also tangents that the author goes on, very stream of consciousness, that took me out of the moment.
As much as I enjoyed the project of this book, I'm unsure how successful it was for me, as a reader. Some sections I quite liked. My favorite section was about a car and landscapes and traveling--Garréta's writing really shone in that chapter.
There were some moments when I was left wondering if Garréta even likes women, because she spoke of them so disparagingly at times. It felt a little misogynistic in some chapters, or at the very least stereotypical and unfair. This book was also written in 2002, so some of the language is dated and not what we would necessarily say these days.
A mixed bag, overall.
March 9, 2024
I think the premise of autofiction is flawed and perhaps predatory — it commodifies the reader’s desire to lay claim to the “real,” lurid details of a supposedly-knowable author’s life, when in actuality, as Garétta writes, “no subject [ie. no author] ever expresses herself in any narration.” One cannot find a subject in these texts, but only a construction that mimics a subject, and even when one attempts to write autobiographically, the distortions of memory will fictionalize as they do here. All of this is to say that I think Garétta’s project in Pas Un Jour, an “autofictive” text which rebukes autofiction entirely, is successful.
But if only it weren’t so insufferable!!!!! There’s a condemnatory tone throughout this text (especially in the ante/post scriptum) that really irritated me: it feels like Garétta is trying to “gotcha” her readers, catch them in the act of wrongfully looking for a subject or wrongfully trying to encroach on her memories/desires. But like… I don’t think it’s necessarily idiotic or naïve to search for a subject/a narrator where the text has constructed one?? Obviously we should still interrogate why exactly we are so invested in trying to unearth the author from a fictive text (even/especially if it claims not to be), and so maybe I’m missing the purpose, and maybe the “gotcha” is necessary for this text to achieve its objective. But really I just kept thinking as I was reading this: why write for an audience you so clearly disdain?
But if only it weren’t so insufferable!!!!! There’s a condemnatory tone throughout this text (especially in the ante/post scriptum) that really irritated me: it feels like Garétta is trying to “gotcha” her readers, catch them in the act of wrongfully looking for a subject or wrongfully trying to encroach on her memories/desires. But like… I don’t think it’s necessarily idiotic or naïve to search for a subject/a narrator where the text has constructed one?? Obviously we should still interrogate why exactly we are so invested in trying to unearth the author from a fictive text (even/especially if it claims not to be), and so maybe I’m missing the purpose, and maybe the “gotcha” is necessary for this text to achieve its objective. But really I just kept thinking as I was reading this: why write for an audience you so clearly disdain?
December 8, 2021
What a trip. I loved that it read like a stream of consciousness and rawness. She wrote that (or it was translated that way) that she wrote it to be a stream of consciousness, thoughts, feelings, memories as they come rather than to conjure specific memories and feelings to paint it as a particular narrative. Because in some ways, that does taint or influence the way romance feels or can be portrayed to people.
But the ending! Was so excellent! I felt like it was perfect. Just marvelous and lovely in so many ways. Highly recommend to everyone.
So full of desire, longing, lust, love, and generally, attraction. I think Anne writes about all of these concepts about the allure of other people whom we find attractive so well. As well as their attraction to her too. That there's something magical, mystical, but not confusing, and sometimes mysterious. This enrapture, this capture that one can hold over us to make us feel so deeply about someone else. I appreciated the descriptiveness beyond words and highly recommend if anyone were to ever put together an anthology of desire, love, lust, attraction, romance to include Anne Garréta too.
But the ending! Was so excellent! I felt like it was perfect. Just marvelous and lovely in so many ways. Highly recommend to everyone.
So full of desire, longing, lust, love, and generally, attraction. I think Anne writes about all of these concepts about the allure of other people whom we find attractive so well. As well as their attraction to her too. That there's something magical, mystical, but not confusing, and sometimes mysterious. This enrapture, this capture that one can hold over us to make us feel so deeply about someone else. I appreciated the descriptiveness beyond words and highly recommend if anyone were to ever put together an anthology of desire, love, lust, attraction, romance to include Anne Garréta too.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 14, 2021
Dans cette galerie des rencontres plus ou moins amoureuses ou érotiques, j'ai aimé la finesse d'analyse de la psychologie de la narratrice comme de celles des femmes croisées sur son chemin. J'ai trouvé touchante cette attention au détail, cette prise en compte de la complexité, de la coexistence simultanées de deux pensées ou sentiments, et aussi la richesse de ce regard rétrospectif qui découvre (ou prétend découvrir) sous les yeux de la lectrice (puisque c'est bien à une lectrice que la narratrice s'adresse) des sentiments restés enfouis jusqu'alors.
Il y a aussi quelque chose de plaisant dans cette sincérité d'autrice (feinte ou non), qui ne se fixe des règles que pour mieux les déjouer et s'interroge sur la nécessité de s'y tenir. Qu'elle joue avec son public n'enlève rien non plus au charme du livre !
Le discours philosophique sur la place du désir dans nos sociétés m'est plus ou moins passé au-dessus de la tête (il était trop tard quand j'ai lu ce post-scriptum), et mériterait une relecture, mais je garde une impression vive de cette galerie de portraits de femmes.
Il y a aussi quelque chose de plaisant dans cette sincérité d'autrice (feinte ou non), qui ne se fixe des règles que pour mieux les déjouer et s'interroge sur la nécessité de s'y tenir. Qu'elle joue avec son public n'enlève rien non plus au charme du livre !
Le discours philosophique sur la place du désir dans nos sociétés m'est plus ou moins passé au-dessus de la tête (il était trop tard quand j'ai lu ce post-scriptum), et mériterait une relecture, mais je garde une impression vive de cette galerie de portraits de femmes.
April 4, 2023
A fucking sadistic book... cannot stop myself from going over the chapters, trying to untangle the lies from the truth, looking for some kind of hidden structure which will reveal the secret. So cruel!!
I do love the use of the second-person as a way to humanize desire, and recenter on the reader instead of Garréta. Instead of a judgment process, where you dissect her relationships from a isolated standpoint and assign blame (or enjoy voyeuristically), you have to approach it as if you are experiencing it, troubled by it, moved by it.
Also interesting how emotionally painful a lot of these episodes are- looking at the knotted aftermath of desire / love. For a book about desire, there's not much sex. But I guess that's honest, and avoids the entrapments of commercializing sex- making it hot, visible, etc. etc. etc.
Will keep this one close to my heart and reread soon.
I do love the use of the second-person as a way to humanize desire, and recenter on the reader instead of Garréta. Instead of a judgment process, where you dissect her relationships from a isolated standpoint and assign blame (or enjoy voyeuristically), you have to approach it as if you are experiencing it, troubled by it, moved by it.
Also interesting how emotionally painful a lot of these episodes are- looking at the knotted aftermath of desire / love. For a book about desire, there's not much sex. But I guess that's honest, and avoids the entrapments of commercializing sex- making it hot, visible, etc. etc. etc.
Will keep this one close to my heart and reread soon.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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