Superstars

by Ann Scott

Louise, la trentaine, est une ancienne musicienne de rock, reconvertie dans la techno. Un matin, au réveil, elle met un disque et replonge vers le passé. Elle a envie de revenir en arrière sans régresser. Louise a besoin et envie de choses simples : toucher la peau d'un garçon, écouter des chansons qui racontent des histoires. Elle est mûre pour une nouvelle chance. Et aussi pour un dérapage, sans doute inévitable

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Lesbian, LGBT, France, Historical, Adult

384 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ann Scott’s novel’s a cult classic in France. It made quite a splash when it first appeared in 2000. Scott’s book grew out of a diary used to vent about the collapse of a brief but intense affair. An affair that led to being shunned by her closest friends. Set in Paris in the mid to late 1990s, it’s narrated by Louise who’s caught up in the city’s underground, queer, techno rave scene. Louise is 31 sharing a dingy apartment with friends Alice and Pallas. All three are broke but Alice and Pallas are used to better things. Alice is an aspiring artist. Pallas is unemployed but convinced she’ll be a superstar someday soon. Louise has abandoned her former life as a rock musician and trying to make it as a DJ. But when Alice’s art takes off she moves out and Pallas and Louise form a close bond. Louise prefers women but still has sex with men from time to time – she’s less likely to fall in love. Their relatively stable existence is shattered when Louise pursues much younger Inès barely 17, she’s still a schoolgirl. She’s also partner to Alex, Louise’s hugely successful former girlfriend. A situation that ultimately leads to Louise spiralling out of control.

Louise’s Paris is a whirlwind of sex, drugs and clubs. Her circle spends their time watching MTV, dropping E’s, wearing vintage Adidas and competing for who has the rarest, vintage tees. An arresting snapshot of Paris’s queer rave scene this felt closer in style and spirit to early Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman or Michelle Tea. Although hard not to wonder if it influenced recent work by Constance Debré. But where Debré projects a studied indifference about the women she encounters, Scott’s world is messy and incestuous, her story increasingly frenzied, as Louise is consumed by desire and desiring. As a novel it’s baggy in places, awkwardly structured. But as a portrait of a, somewhat-rarefied, queer subculture and an era it’s strangely compulsive. Self-centred, self-deluding Louise is difficult to actually like – at times she’s close to repulsive - but at the same time hard not to root for. Translated by Jonathan Woollen.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Pushkin Press for an ARC

[jocelyn • coolgalreading]

i should've loved this but it became sort of a chore to pick up

[Kobe · Rating 3 out of 5]

very messy very queer very chaotic but maybe a little repetitive?

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Superstars’ reads like the hardcore nepo baby of ‘The L Word’ and ‘brat’, except it was originally published in French in 2000 and thus predates those pieces of media entirely. We don’t really follow a plot as much as experience the life of Louise, a DJ in her early 30s, as she drifts in a drug-fueled haze through the queer Parisian techno scene.

Louise is deeply unlikeable and at best completely delusional. At one point, she monologues about how she’s so mature and knows how act in relationships, but at the same time is in a secret situationship with her ex’s new girlfriend (who is 17, btw) and then cheats on said situationship with her current roommate and best friend (did I mention this is a book about lesbians? Lol).

The authentic 90s setting is really prominent and enjoyable. Louise is annoyed by Britney Spears and everyone’s baggy clothes (she’s clearly not like other girls) and she constantly watches MTV. The ravers also have a “standard survival kit” that consists of a TV, VCR, and stereo.

Louise struggles with a heroin addiction, which gets increasingly worse as she crashes-out more and more throughout the novel. In general, the hard drug-use that’s portrayed is pretty graphic and consistent, so be aware of triggers related to that before reading.

The writing and translation are both excellent; some moments in the novel are truly beautiful and made me pause. Overall, I enjoyed ‘Superstars’ and I’m excited that it’s finally being released in English!

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an e-arc.*

[Leonie · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/4 (3.25 stars, rounded down here)

Picture the TV shows friends and the L word having a baby and that’s exactly what you‘ll get when you read this. Though, add to that a wild mix of chaos and a rather unlikeable main character who, at 31, thinks she knows all about life but totally doesn’t.
Speaking about the main character, more often than not, I felt sorry for Louise though I did think she was pretty unlikeable in the way she acted (i.e having an affair with a 17 year old who simultaneously has a relationship with Louise’s friend) and all of the supporting characters are (just like Louise) always hooked on some kind of drug. The novel shines, though, through its atmosphere. Even while not being born/raised in the 90s, one could picture Paris in the 90s sooo very well and I loved living through this story!!
Overall though, I think if you’re a fan of very crazy, chaotic but atmospheric stories and don’t mind unlikable characters then this might just be for you.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this novel in exchange for an honest and voluntarily given review.

[Regan · Rating 2 out of 5]

An Ordeal

[Ludwig Hurtado · Rating 3 out of 5]

girl, that's what you get for falling in love with a teenager !

[Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written so specifically for me personally, that it’s hard to provide an objective review of its literary qualities and merits.

For 300 pages you are stuck in the head of an insufferable French scorpio in her early 30’s as she justifies the series of horrible decisions and sleeps with a variety of men, women, exes, friends, teens and inbetweens.

On the surface level it is not unlike a salacious tabloid article or a melodramatic daytime soap opera, reinforcing lesbian stereotypes galore. What elevates the book in my eyes is the masterfully crafted prose, its own unique voice (kudos to the translator!) and the very real and very deep emotional landscape that anchors the blasé, sensationalist plot.

[Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

queer and sexy and dirty… but also very repetitive and not really sure the point?

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

The vibes in this book are IMMACULATE. It follows a sapphic friend group of DJs and party girls in Y2K-era France as they lust after and feud with one another. In her early thirties, the main character, Louise, is the oldest of the group, and she’s just signed a life-changing record deal. The problem is that she’s becoming disenchanted with the techno beats they signed her for and longs for rock music. Her life becomes more complicated when she falls for the worst possible person, someone with the potential to alienate her from her closest friends.

I’m starting to get really into translated French literature and this is one of my favourites I’ve read. It’s like Rent meets Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life but set in the nightclubs of Paris. I’m a big fan!

Thank you to the publisher for giving me access to an eARC of this book!

[Marco · Rating 2 out of 5]

300 pages that felt like 3000

[leila · Rating 4 out of 5]

book of drama, good but repetitive

[Pula]

bought in Paris (in THE Shakespeare & Co bookshop well of course), not realising this would now be my third Astra House book... I think I might have a favourite publisher this is so cool

[Madisen Armstrong · Rating 2 out of 5]

awesome book to read if you want to ultimately come to the author’s stellar conclusion that being a lesbian is the same thing as having a heroin addiction (and that those things are both choices)

[Kim Goodwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a blind buy at a bookstore, and the description grabbed me immediately: 90s Paris techno scene, lesbian drama. How could I not pick it up?

The 90s setting was so fun to read. I loved the details of the keyboard manuals and all the very contemporary analog time stamps. Living in today's world, you can't help but romanticize an era with tons of technology but none of the phone addiction lol

The scenes that landed hardest for me were the party scenes, especially early on, the exhilaration of the music. I loved all the music references, the DJ Hell shoutout, all her gear, all the clothing brands from that era. If this had just been the story of her making the record and playing parties, I could've read that forever.

Then there's the relationship drama. Louise, how she's writtenas the grounded, wronged one, the good partner, when she's actually a disaster. Tbhh worse than everyone else, because at least the others seem to know they're selfish and rotten and own what they want. Louise's savior complex and self image as "the good one" felt way more insidious to me.

It was very dramatic. The love triangle, the total lack of grounding in the relationship. Maybe that was the point, though, to show Louise's addiction. Her trying to become Alex, the envy in that. Louise doesn't actually possess the thing she admires in all her past lovers, that sense of being tethered to a passion. She's fundamentally listless. Even by the end, she's already fixating on the potential new lover she meets at Nikki's place.

That's clearly the point of the storytelling and I wouldn't want it told differently. But I am curious whether we're meant to see through Louise, the book wants us to feel empathy for her. Because I never did, not even by the end. As someone said in one of the reviews, the girl
Is 17! WTH! Ugh ya, her being a child and her, and the preciousness of that described in the book was pretty yuck


Last thing! Also, very interesting the ending about girls not being good for her, I feel like I need to sit with that more. If this is supposed to be kind of a delusional new pattern, she’s repeating, if it’s supposed to be this suppression. Or if it’s meant at face value. Hm.

[Addie Buchner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Messy, messy lesbian drama! Set in the 90s French rave scene and chock full of graphic sex and drug use scenes. Very raw and tough to read at times, but felt extremely authentic.

[Dorsey Ensor · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Did NOT like Ines being 17 and the fixation on her childlikeness.

The punk lesbian scene seemed a bit stressful!
#pride?

[Tess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bright lights big city meets the l word meets a y2k rave sounds like a good time but is actually a slog

[Eva Jeanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

je suis toujours super émue des récits lesbien qui dépeignent des moments que je n’ai pas vécu pcq suis un bb et qui ancrent ses moments dans la réalité. allo les lesbiennes ne sont pas nées hier, tout comme leurs lieux de sociabilité, leurs codes et leurs dramas. ici j’avoue que j’ai sauté des pages parce que les descriptions de dr0gue à la fin c’était compliqué pour moi a lire, surtout quand ça fait 150 pages que c’est quasi que ça. MAIS ça m’a fait rire de voir que Carhartt fonctionne avec notre agent et ça depuis avant 2002 bref merci !!

[Kiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe closer to 3.5 than 4 but idk I had a pretty good time with this one. Very messy, VERY hot, kinda like the L Word if any of them had good taste in anything. Need to go out dancing to techno ASAP! Also liked this better than Valencia even though Valencia takes place in my city !

[Bryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

What did I just read lol. I both hated this book and felt compelled by it. Yikes, Louise would get cancelled so fast today. This felt very Lolita meets On The Road meets the most toxic bisexual you've ever met. But, still I couldn't put it down. What a ride.

[Amelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

yikes! readable but at what cost

[Alex Provasnik]

Very entertaining

[Ruby · Rating 2 out of 5]

They’re marketing this book in the states as some sapphic popstar story, which is really rich given it’s a story about addiction, obsession and overall mental health. It was hard for me to understand what the authors point was because like I said, it was marketed to me as a lesbian love story and I was fighting with myself the whole time on if she was actually even a lesbian or just someone that likes to forget about themselves by using sex and drugs.

Marketing aside, it was okay. It’s one of those books where you hate all the characters because they’re all way too self obsessed but I didn’t see many redeeming qualities that made me care what happened

[Yvette Verwer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book (if I have to pick one), I have read it four times now and it is still addictive. I love the characters and the action and it is about music and lesbians, so what is not to like....

[Marteau Piqueur · Rating 3 out of 5]

j’ai été certes happée par l’intensité de ce livre mais je l’ai trouvé hautement problématique dans le traitement de l’homosexualité. de l’homophobie internalisee, assumée, pure. les scènes de sexe étaient aussi ultra TW en terme de consentement et de violence.
:s

[nicovelvet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lu tellement de fois!! Un grand roman à lire et relire en y trouvant toujours les mêmes émotions.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2000, Ann Scott released Superstars, a novel about young women in the Paris rave scene, and it became a cult sensation. Twenty-six years later, we get an English translation, and the story feels like a time capsule, a reminder of how the late nineties so far removed that we can look back with nostalgia and horror. The story’s central character is Louise, a DJ and artist trying to figure out how to navigate her way through the dance scene. She is older than the rest of the women she parties and has sex with, in her early thirties compared to everyone else being in their early to mid-20s (except her biggest love interest Ines, who is seventeen). Louise is drifting from party to party, from drug to drug, and from woman to man to woman. Louise is not the most likeable character and her biggest flaw is that she does not see this in the actions and reactions of all of her friends. 

Louise is a pathetic character. Even though she has a record contract and an advance coming from Virgin Records for her debut album, the only reason most of her friends stick around is for her payday, the day her advance gets deposited into her account and she can pay back the money that she borrowed from all of them. Her friendship with the women and her place in the group barely makes it to this point because Louise has not only worked her way through most all of the friends sexually, she has some nights where she can no longer function due to her drugs and bad behavior. Louise is aware that her behavior is making some of her friend group distance themselves from her but she does not find their coldness as something she did. When her advance is deposited, even the money that they are owed is not enough to repair the damages that have been done. 

An unspoken thing about Louise with this group is her age. Since she is older than the rest of the girls, getting into the scene after a long relationship with Nikki, a guy who idolizes the Rolling Stones, and only embraces the rave scene due to her girlfriend Alex. I can see that her friends only accept her to a degree. She is someone to hang out with, but they do not trust her, probably see her as a bit of a poser, and none of them are close to her outside of the bedroom. I feel like there are some conversations about her behind her back, calling her creepy and pathetic. An older person in a young person’s scene is never fully embraced except for the things that she can do for them. Once she is too much of a hassle or is too annoying for them to be around anymore, they cut her off. She does not exactly understand. This might be that she has been in such a drug haze that she cannot recognize the way she is perceived and treated in her friend group. This becomes her downfall.

Superstar does feel like a time capsule, a walk down memory lane. I remember how popular some of the music she mentions was at that time. I did not go to raves or do heroin, but I would have been the same age as most of Louise’s friends at the time this takes place. When the discussion about the popularity of Marilyn Manson, particularly the album Mechanical Animals and the song “Dope Show”, I remember how much we listened to the CD in the car. There are also times when Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin are put on repeat in the background, and there were so many times when a CD would get played over and over while we did other things (not so much drugs as video games and reading books). I love the feeling and the vibes this novel brings, like a musical and cinematic moment in time is dusted off. Superstars also feels like many of the other drug books and movies that were very popular at the time, those stories where the drug use and the partying steal all of the time and creativity from many good artists that never finished their novel or their album. There could have been many more books telling stories equal to Superstars, but they were not written because the scene swallowed them up. Fortunately we get this novel and this perspective. It is a masterful document that very deftly illustrates how being young in the late 90s and early 2000s felt. I found this compelling and a little nostalgic to a time of renting videos for the VHS and smoking cigarettes absolutely everywhere. I am shocked that not only is this the first translation of Superstars, but it is the first of any of Ann Scott's books that has been translated into English. I hope we get to read more of her work in English.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Julia Rhea · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

Louise, after recently turning 30, lands a dream of a record contract as a techno artist in the late 90s. This accomplishment is accompanied by a shift in her queer friend group as Lousie has recently broken up with her girlfriend who immediately began to date… I sigh as I say this… A 17-year-old. Louise has a bit of an identity crisis, but through her we get a glimpse into this friend group and all the fun shit they got up to in the Paris techno scene.

“Superstars” by Ann Scott read like 00s trashy reality TV show (it kept bringing me back to Skins and Jersey Shore), and I’m not going to lie, I loved it for that reason. It was nice to lose myself in distinct scene. The dizziness of the drugs, the thumping of the club, the absolute chaos of the queer friend group who all seem to hook-up with each other seemingly at random (which could also be called into question as it is a harmful stereotype). But, as someone who is usually down for a drama debrief… I found it entertaining.

One of my major qualms with the book was its tendency to over-explain or indulge in far too many details. I’m not sure if this was due to the translation from French to English, or if that is all what was already packed in there. But, I don’t need to know every single item in every single living room we enter. Just list what is important, give me the vibe of the space and we will be all set.

My other hiccup was the portrayal of the 17-year-old who finds her way into this group, there is a lot of explicit details given regarding her character and various people falling in love with her. While reading all I wanted to do was take her out of the novel and say “run away from all of that please.” I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, wondering if it was a commentary on the sexualization of young queer women, and maybe it was, but overall it just felt a little off to me. I was questioning if it was making a statement or leaning into the fetish of it all. For my sake, I’m hoping it was a statement. She more so seemed to be a vessel for people to project their idea of “youth” into, wanting to be with her while also wanting to be her. I don’t know, the 90s/00s were a gross time, I wish the messaging was more clear, but maybe that was the point because I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Thank you so much to the publishers and NetGalley for sending me an ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review

[Lucy]

I received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

DNF at 37%

This was a really interesting look at the queer rave scene in Paris in the 90s. There was a lot going on and this didn’t shy away from showing everything.

However, there were a few things I just couldn’t look past and made me want to stop reading.

I have seen lots of reviews calling this book lesbian and on Goodreads it is tagged as lesbian. The main character, Louise, is certainly not a lesbian as she sleeps with various men multiple times. This book is definitely queer but it is not lesbian. I think it is being wrongly marketed a little bit.

This book couldn’t really keep my attention or make me want to continue reading as I didn’t care about the characters or the plot.

It is definitely of its time and the characters opinions demonstrated that.

Louise, who is in her early 30s, ends up in a situationship with her ex girlfriend’s new girlfriend, who is a 17 year old. This was completely inappropriate and icky and gross and I just couldn’t bring myself to read more of it.

Louise is not very likeable at all and neither are any of the other characters really.

The writing style is good, I just can’t get past the rest of the story.