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Parésie
Parésie ou paralysie légère et incomplète que trahit une diminution de la torce musculaire. Telle est la réponse qu'invente le corps amoureux d'une jeune femme pour témoigner de l'absence de l'être aimé.
Une longue et fascinante traversée somatique dans l'univers émotionnel.
Une longue et fascinante traversée somatique dans l'univers émotionnel.
118 pages, Paperback
First published March 6, 2002
393 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
July 27, 2022
"My constant sorrow is indecency itself, the sheer pornography, the decomposition in vivo of flesh..."
March 5, 2021
Unhealthy obsession, grotesque self-harm, profound romantic disappointment, dangerous mental instability... Paresis has all of this and more and I loved it.
I picked it up intending to read roughly half of it before going to sleep for the night, but instead ended up devouring it in one sitting. It couldn’t be helped. It grabbed me right away and wouldn’t let go until I reached the final pages, and afterward I just kind of sat there in a haunted silence. (The ending was EXTREMELY haunting, but I’m not here to spoil anything. Get a copy and read it yourself.)
The prose itself, translated beautifully from the original French, is delightful. I’d describe it as “density in breezy clothing” (if that makes any sense), and it hits like an absolute fucking bludgeon when it (frequently) needs to.
For example:
“I am going to grow old and there’s nothing to be done about it. My disgust finds new sustenance every minute and I want to see where it will lead me. It’s curiosity, and not hope, that keeps me going through the motions of daily life; it’s a sense of the derisory, and not of revolt, that lets me put an X on everything around me. My atheism is pitiless; no faith in anything will free it from this sordidness, no higher truth will justify my erring ways. Nothing left of the breath that animated me from within and instantly transformed my languor into impatience, anger and contempt that neither suffering nor fatigue could diminish; all that’s left is the powerlessness of solitude: to turn my back, leave, sulk, stay silent. Your absence has taken everything from me, even the disdain I can no longer feel for it.”
(p. 77-78)
Paresis really got under my skin in the best way, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come. Major props to Amphetamine Sulphate for making this fascinating work available to English-speaking audiences for the first time. I’m greatly looking forward to reading the author’s second novel, Genesis 0, very soon.
Highly recommended.
I picked it up intending to read roughly half of it before going to sleep for the night, but instead ended up devouring it in one sitting. It couldn’t be helped. It grabbed me right away and wouldn’t let go until I reached the final pages, and afterward I just kind of sat there in a haunted silence. (The ending was EXTREMELY haunting, but I’m not here to spoil anything. Get a copy and read it yourself.)
The prose itself, translated beautifully from the original French, is delightful. I’d describe it as “density in breezy clothing” (if that makes any sense), and it hits like an absolute fucking bludgeon when it (frequently) needs to.
For example:
“I am going to grow old and there’s nothing to be done about it. My disgust finds new sustenance every minute and I want to see where it will lead me. It’s curiosity, and not hope, that keeps me going through the motions of daily life; it’s a sense of the derisory, and not of revolt, that lets me put an X on everything around me. My atheism is pitiless; no faith in anything will free it from this sordidness, no higher truth will justify my erring ways. Nothing left of the breath that animated me from within and instantly transformed my languor into impatience, anger and contempt that neither suffering nor fatigue could diminish; all that’s left is the powerlessness of solitude: to turn my back, leave, sulk, stay silent. Your absence has taken everything from me, even the disdain I can no longer feel for it.”
(p. 77-78)
Paresis really got under my skin in the best way, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come. Major props to Amphetamine Sulphate for making this fascinating work available to English-speaking audiences for the first time. I’m greatly looking forward to reading the author’s second novel, Genesis 0, very soon.
Highly recommended.
July 1, 2021
hypnotic in its undying devotion to an unrequited love of both another person and the self.
May 19, 2021
Even after finishing this in two sittings, I am still here thinking about everything that happened throughout the book.
We travel through a narrative of pain and obsession which are all relatable/humanistic traits we go through at points in life.
The book is a hypnotic and gruesome must read that is almost impossible to put down.
Highly recommend.
We travel through a narrative of pain and obsession which are all relatable/humanistic traits we go through at points in life.
The book is a hypnotic and gruesome must read that is almost impossible to put down.
Highly recommend.
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January 15, 2022This one left me bewildered, a truly strange novella.
January 6, 2022
Texte qu'on lit habituellement d'étudiantes universitaires fréquentant les soirées littéraires dans les cafés. Ces aveux hypersexués de descriptions phénoménologiques. Très réussi malgré la forme.
Travail acharné du language qui puise dans le vocabulaire légal et médical. Une symétrie poétique de la métaphysique. Une analyse critique autant du rejet que du désir. Un jeu de glaces équilibré.
Une surveillance millimètrique du sentiment, de sa trajectoire physique et psychologique. Un côté Beat dans tout ça, le libertin poétique. Très cérébral et sexuel mais teinté de honte et de culpabilité...donc très juif.
Très profond, ne s'en tient pas qu'à la peine amoureuse. C'est le sens d'une vie qu'elle recherche avec toutes ses lueurs et noirceurs. Mutilation, démembrement, brûlure, la désacralisation du corps. Vie ou mort, destruction ou composition?
C'est entre ses pôles que la narratrice navigue. Ce sont de ces eaux qu'en ressortent les mots. Finalement un vrai texte littéraire: une excursion dans le fossé entre le corps et le langage
Travail acharné du language qui puise dans le vocabulaire légal et médical. Une symétrie poétique de la métaphysique. Une analyse critique autant du rejet que du désir. Un jeu de glaces équilibré.
Une surveillance millimètrique du sentiment, de sa trajectoire physique et psychologique. Un côté Beat dans tout ça, le libertin poétique. Très cérébral et sexuel mais teinté de honte et de culpabilité...donc très juif.
Très profond, ne s'en tient pas qu'à la peine amoureuse. C'est le sens d'une vie qu'elle recherche avec toutes ses lueurs et noirceurs. Mutilation, démembrement, brûlure, la désacralisation du corps. Vie ou mort, destruction ou composition?
C'est entre ses pôles que la narratrice navigue. Ce sont de ces eaux qu'en ressortent les mots. Finalement un vrai texte littéraire: une excursion dans le fossé entre le corps et le langage
July 17, 2022
Not gonna lie I love a book that makes you feel a lil queasy, that's really my shit.
April 20, 2022
Incredible book. Obsession exudes from every page as we bear witness to our narrator’s internal thoughts and actions as they troublingly cope with a crumbling relationship and psyche. Very intense, I devoured this novel.
July 7, 2022
A fantastic voice and unerring style. It carries you through it's vision effortlessly. It's as if one single breath was held for the duration, and only after closing its pages can you finally exhale, before inhaling deeply a new air, brand new, now incomparable. A brilliant modern work that will grow fonder in time.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 10, 2021
I finished this book in just a couple sittings. It’s so beautifully presented, in its writing, translation to English through Katie Shireen Assef and publication via Amphetamine Sulphate. So precise in its language, both beautiful and direct. It blurs the already often indiscernible line between love and lust. Cannot wait to get into more of Nicou’s works!
April 3, 2022
Paresis is Nicou’s first novel, a tale of erotic obsession to the point of Sadean self-abasement. The narrator is a 30-something woman with a strong, seemingly mutual, attraction for a man who paws her with the lust of a predator, but then walks away without having sex. The man otherwise ignores her, which only inflames her desire more: A sadistic sexual relationship in which sex never happens. Despite her eagerness for sex, the man tells her of a previous heartbreak that seems to have left him impotent. (Please.)
At the novel’s beginning the love object has already left, with the psycho-physical after-effect being the narrator’s right side draws into a state of paresis. (Her arm really isn’t paralyzed but she can’t control it either from doing other than hang at her side.) She spends the chapters mulling over what they did together—and what they did not do together that left her doing it alone. One thing they did together was for him to slap her face and she to enjoy it.
"And even if you were this vile creature who makes me suffer to satisfy his ego, it’s this vile creature that I love.
"No better or worse than you, only the tails to your heads. My evidence is in the marks left by your slaps, our impossible osmosis in my shame. A shame that’s none of their business. . ."
And:
"Your shadow spreads over the right side of the bed; words drift toward me, they speak of pain and its consolation, of the two intertwined, and how I can endure everything if I know that in the end, I’ll feel your breath on the back of my neck."
(As an observation, I find it difficult to imagine an American Leftist intellectual publicly admitting to such predilections, let alone condoning them. Is this a form of self-censorship?)
While separated from this man, she has angry sex with a woman and a man (separately) and engages in self-mutilation by cutting and burning herself: “From the nuances of deflections something beyond speech wells up desire or its absence, the ancient joining of bodies, the urges we did or didn’t act on, the oscillation between with and without, between what’s missing and what’s lost.”
Erotic lust towards this man exists only as over-stimulus: it simultaneously hurts as it elates—there is no psychological-physiological balance. “[S]exuality, like any relation to otherness, is as impossible to the body as it is useless, but not unknown, and if it understands the desire to embrace it and refuses the gesture, it’s because the mad, empathetic embrace is precisely what makes it burn.”
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
At the novel’s beginning the love object has already left, with the psycho-physical after-effect being the narrator’s right side draws into a state of paresis. (Her arm really isn’t paralyzed but she can’t control it either from doing other than hang at her side.) She spends the chapters mulling over what they did together—and what they did not do together that left her doing it alone. One thing they did together was for him to slap her face and she to enjoy it.
"And even if you were this vile creature who makes me suffer to satisfy his ego, it’s this vile creature that I love.
"No better or worse than you, only the tails to your heads. My evidence is in the marks left by your slaps, our impossible osmosis in my shame. A shame that’s none of their business. . ."
And:
"Your shadow spreads over the right side of the bed; words drift toward me, they speak of pain and its consolation, of the two intertwined, and how I can endure everything if I know that in the end, I’ll feel your breath on the back of my neck."
(As an observation, I find it difficult to imagine an American Leftist intellectual publicly admitting to such predilections, let alone condoning them. Is this a form of self-censorship?)
While separated from this man, she has angry sex with a woman and a man (separately) and engages in self-mutilation by cutting and burning herself: “From the nuances of deflections something beyond speech wells up desire or its absence, the ancient joining of bodies, the urges we did or didn’t act on, the oscillation between with and without, between what’s missing and what’s lost.”
Erotic lust towards this man exists only as over-stimulus: it simultaneously hurts as it elates—there is no psychological-physiological balance. “[S]exuality, like any relation to otherness, is as impossible to the body as it is useless, but not unknown, and if it understands the desire to embrace it and refuses the gesture, it’s because the mad, empathetic embrace is precisely what makes it burn.”
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
March 9, 2022
this is what ottessa moshfegh tries to do
March 16, 2023
“Burrowed in the veins that quiver at my temples, I can glimpse the fissure in the one who so skilfully broke me in half. My inhibition is only a veneer; don’t cry victory.”
.
Man breaks up with woman. She becomes obsessed with him.
Her obsession makes him the main focal point for all to orbit around.
A tale told many times over.
.
But in Paresis the him is nothing but a minor character; reduced down to an unnamed being and hardly ever present, even though technically this is about his breakup of her.
.
And his reduction occurs with her defining herself by her obsession of him. Thus becoming the focal point instead - for it is about her ego and identity and the emptiness found in narrowing everything down to the actions of another.
.
She desires to protect herself from herself,
But:
Desperation to make him come back to her.
Narcissism in trying to control him.
Anger and humiliation when she loses.
Emptiness through boredom with him around and when he isn’t.
All of these intense emotions create turmoil within and are allowed release only physically through paresis of her right side.
Therefore this also becomes an example of when it is all in your head (ie not a result of an underlying physical condition).
.
Haunting and intense, Paresis is beautiful by phrase and dark by premise.
.
Recommended for: people wanting a short, introspective, intense and meditative read on a breakup but have it be less about the breakup.
.
Man breaks up with woman. She becomes obsessed with him.
Her obsession makes him the main focal point for all to orbit around.
A tale told many times over.
.
But in Paresis the him is nothing but a minor character; reduced down to an unnamed being and hardly ever present, even though technically this is about his breakup of her.
.
And his reduction occurs with her defining herself by her obsession of him. Thus becoming the focal point instead - for it is about her ego and identity and the emptiness found in narrowing everything down to the actions of another.
.
She desires to protect herself from herself,
But:
Desperation to make him come back to her.
Narcissism in trying to control him.
Anger and humiliation when she loses.
Emptiness through boredom with him around and when he isn’t.
All of these intense emotions create turmoil within and are allowed release only physically through paresis of her right side.
Therefore this also becomes an example of when it is all in your head (ie not a result of an underlying physical condition).
.
Haunting and intense, Paresis is beautiful by phrase and dark by premise.
.
Recommended for: people wanting a short, introspective, intense and meditative read on a breakup but have it be less about the breakup.
December 3, 2024
inner working of a rampant obsession of desiring someone, constantly having them under our fleshes, this tight gripping of self and the Other, eloquently posed with a stream-of-consciousness oeuvre that profiles a insidious obsession over an entity - she brings life in herself, through a slight paralysis, to the man who forsakes her. the description of that desire was so eminently profound, it felt like we were supplanted; embedded within her. that overwhelming desire that breaks frontier of the ego (her own desire, ardor) and the self (partial paralysis of part of her body), in conjunction to the Other (her toxic lover). what a book.
February 19, 2025
reading this is akin to hanging out w ur straight bestie who can’t stop compulsively monologuing abt her latest deadbeat Tinder fwb. u wish she wld finally find a therapist, or at the v least, read the Wikipedia pages on “avoidant attachment” and “limerence” that u sent her, but u know itll never happen… perhaps whats actually most uncomfortable abt the experience is that it reflects the parts of u that u like to think u’ve healed from—even tho 2 years from now, you’ll be sounding exactly the same when u fall unceremoniously and head-first into ur own upcoming toxic void of guttural, abject, soul-shattering, and completely nonsensical yearning.
March 4, 2023
abject, desolately obsessed and toxically slutty :)
January 8, 2024
Cold and damp
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews