Panics

by Barbara Molinard, Emma Ramadan (Translator)

A haunting, bizarre short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience.

A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (1921–1986) wrote and wrote feverishly, but only managed to publish one book in her the surreal, nightmarish collection Panics.

These thirteen stories beat with a frantic, off-kilter rhythm as Molinard obsesses over sickness, death, and control. A woman becomes transfixed by a boa constrictor at her local zoo, mysterious surgeons dismember their patient, and the author narrates to Duras how she was stopped from sleeping in a cemetery vault, only to be haunted by the pain of sleeping on its stone floor.

In the unsettling tradition of Franz Kafka, Djuna Barnes, Leonara Carrington, and more, Panics recovers the work of a tormented writer who often destroyed her writing as soon as she produced it, and whose insights into violence, mental illness, and bodily autonomy are simultaneously absurdist and razor-sharp.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, France, Mental Health, Collections, Feminism

125 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1969

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barbara Molinard was an apparently prolific, near-compulsive writer but as soon as she finished anything she destroyed it, even the contents of Panics (Viens) her only surviving book, were initially ripped to shreds or burnt. It was only at the urging of Molinard’s close friend Marguerite Duras that a handful of pieces were eventually rescued and published in France in 1969. Mostly very brief, and displaying the influences of writers like Beckett and Breton, these are uniformly disturbing visions of a hostile, logic-defying world recounted in precise but hallucinatory detail. Molinard’s characters are alienated and tormented, by themselves or the people around them, sometimes trapped in sinister institutions, sometimes adrift in violent dystopian settings, as in the weird fable-like “The Severed Arm.” There’s an impression of overwhelming anxiety and suffocation throughout, an obsession with death, and what Molinard called “the void.” Molinard’s fiction's accompanied by a distinctly odd preface from Marguerite Duras and an elliptical interview between Duras and Molinard, it’s a difficult book to pin down but its surreal, nightmarish landscapes made a strong impression. Translated here by Emma Ramadan.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher The Feminist Press for an ARC.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I think I found her artwork more intriguing than her writing. Not a bad read, though.

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The veil that masked the houses and the land has ripped open this morning. Everything around me is remarkable. My eyes fill up with beauty."

"Searching her house for the amazingly agile objects that were forever moving around, she lost an infinite amount of time."

"Sometimes I see the three gentlemen. Their sharp gazes follow me as I continue to make my way through the night. They’re buried under thousands of boxes. One of the boxes bursts into flames as I pass. I think that one’s mine."

Weird literature! We love to read it! But some weird literature consists mainly of individual sentences and paragraphs that work, but overall it doesn't have enough coherence and it disintegrates on a structural level. And that's where I land with Barbara Molinards short stories. Lovely elements, but too directionless for me.

(Picked up a review copy through Edelweiss)

[sydney · Rating 5 out of 5]

deeply unsettling (in the best way)

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What readers will find here is neither invented nor dreamed. It’s a record of lived experience. Writing is a part of that. Writing is lived.”
- Marguerite Duras’ Preface to Panics

I absolutely loved Barbara Molinard’s Panics. Finding a spot for it in my mind’s library, I would climb a ladder and put it between Kafka and Silvina Ocampo, with Leonora Carrington (on her less magical and fantastical days) nearby. The stories in Panic are surreal nightmares, not of another world, but of this world—in all its warped, disorienting, incongruous terror. The stories are almost dreamlike, with logic at its most absurd and almost childlike, a feeling of standing on shifting sands, something always missing or not quite right, and, finally, how the mind and body exist but can never be trusted in a reality riddled with illness, paranoia, and delusion. But there are also just beautiful moments, joy and grief hand in hand like old lovers reunited.

“It wasn’t until the rain, the wind, and the frost dismayed the passersby, who walked quickly without looking around, their heads tucked behind their coat collars, that she felt a certain harmony between the world, the weather, and herself: a harmony of graynes, a harmony of sadness.”

This is really the only surviving collection of her work, and we are lucky to even have this—thanks to Duras and Molinard’s husband saving these from Molinard’s ritualistic destruction of her own work and thanks to the translator Emma Ramadan for discovering Duras’ preface and working to get it translated and published into English (it has been republished in French this year as well).

“Frozen with terror, she couldn’t wrest her eyes from that face, crazed at the thought that her friend, he, her friend, the man she had taken for her friend, was part of the world of THE OTHERS, that hostile bizarre world of which she knew nothing except that it could not be her own.”

“The human race is flawed. The cities are flawed. The modes of transportation are all wrong: either you miss them or they don’t bring you where you want to go. A few confident people roam through this universe, never cured of their loving, their serving, their waiting.”
-Duras, Preface


4.5*.... Loved this.

[Lene Kretschz · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded down

'Panics' was clearly a passion project for translator Emma Ramadan (who makes her case for the translation in an afterword) but I can't say I share her enthusiasm. A few of the early stories in the collection ("The Plane from Santa Rosa", "The Meeting") were mildly intriguing and disquieting but my interest waned as each little vignette covered essentially the same emotional territory, played out the same themes, always in a prose so artless and flat that it seemed almost deliberately childlike. Single page tales took me forever to finish simply because I lost interest almost immediately on starting them and kept putting the book down or falling asleep over it. Setting aside the vivid splashes of Molinard's art and the tragic facts of her briefish life, there's just not enough here to merit renewed attention to this particular author.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disturbing glimpses into the mind of an insane person.

[Johanna Berg Davidsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Denne plukket jeg tilfeldigvis opp fordi jeg kjente igjen navnet på forfatteren som har skrevet forordet, Marguerite Duras. Og for en overraskelse! Absurde og angstvekkende fortellinger som virkelig satte en støkk i meg. Samtidig er det noe svært rørende ved dem. Måtte ha noen pauser og lese historiene mellom andre bøker for å få tid til å fordøye dem.

[Morgan Talty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notorious for having destroyed most of her writing, Barbara Molinard has given us a sacred gift in PANICS. These stories are rendered with a mastery that directly conveys the preciousness of life. At the end, I found myself in a bit of panic, so to speak—how to go on having seen something so gorgeous?

[Sophy H · Rating 1 out of 5]

Erm, this should have been titled Tripping Balls!

Every single story in this collection is nonsensical and seems to be portraying someone in the throes of a psychotic break/mental illness crisis and not in a good way, in a voyeuristic, watch a car crash from the sidelines type way.

I couldn't get into any of the stories and actually ended up feeling sorry for Barbara Molinard in that all her brain could conjure were these disjointed, garbled tales of misery and woe.

The foreword by Marguerite Duras states that Molinard was in a bad way mentally most of the time, ripping up and destroying most of her writing. Perhaps she sensed that it was too disordered to be able to read, who knows.

A sad one star collection.

[Frankie DeGiorgio · Rating 3 out of 5]

These kinds of stories that feel like dreams you won’t remember in the morning are really not to my taste but I find Molinard’s whole thing fascinating and strangely admirable.

[Avery · Rating 3 out of 5]

good book! but after the first 80 pages, i began to feel uncomfortably trapped in the author’s POV, and basically skimmed the last 60 pages

[Neven · Rating 4 out of 5]

It stands to reason that many writers struggled with serious mental illness, some hiding it from their writing, some perhaps embedding it into their work intentionally, or feeling that they have no choice in the matter. Barbara Molinard’s few surviving works (most of them, she destroyed) are essentially made up OF her psychological struggles.

Speaking in colloquial rather than clinical terms, what you’ll find here is paranoia, hallucination, dysmorphia, self-doubt, exhaustion, obsession. Every story is stitched out of such intrusive and upsetting experiences, every protagonist unable to function happily.

This makes the book special; you’re given a window onto something private and tender, odd and uncomfortable and—for me, at least—mercifully not super relatable. It also feels voyeuristic at times, too raw, hard to handle.

Normally I gravitate toward such fiction, for reasons I don’t want to psychoanalyze here; if I’m honest, it’s my version of escapist entertainment. So this book does the job of presenting dark ideas that are hard to categorize, something I dig. However, its back story also reminds me that Weird Fiction can’t be too fun to have to live through.

[Elena Varg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This didn’t quite hit the mark for me. Molinard succesfully creates a fevered, nightmare like athmosphere which carried the whole collection. The short-stories become very repetitive very quickly: someone is always late, time always seems to move in massive leaps, something violent happens.

My favorites from the collection were the stories with a clear (or not so clear, this is surrealism after all) storyline: ”Taxi”, ”The Sponge” and ”I’m alone and It’s Night”. ”Happiness” would’ve been a fun one, but Molinard overly explains what happens in the very last sentence, almost like she didn’t quite trust her own writing to paint the kind of picture she wanted it to.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book on the plane in one sitting and I feel like I just took a long walk through the Black Lodge

[Mads · Rating 5 out of 5]

terrifyingly brilliant and beautiful

[Olivia Russo · Rating 5 out of 5]

exactly what i was expecting/hoping it would be! super bizarre & unsettling - a great spooky season read!
my favorite stories were: the plane from santa rosa, the cage, and happiness.

[Atulya Kriday · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barbara Molinard’s Panics is a striking collection of tales aberrant and peculiar. From brief snippets to delirious interludes, the titular emotion pulses throughout the narrative with undertones of madness, paranoia, and dissolution. Each story unfolds either in bizarre worlds or in phantasms, where the familiar becomes alien and grotesque is the new normal. Except for a select few stories, Panics casts singular characters who grapple with ‘VOICE’ and/or ‘VOID’ in tandem with violence of body and mind. And the result is a circuitous, often hallucinatory, but an unforgettable exploration of death, loss, and mental-illness.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher The Feminist Press for an ARC.

[Amelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wish I had liked this one more than I did. It looked experimental, full of beautiful language and insight. Maybe it's because this is a collection of short stories--not usually my preferred format in the first place, as I find myself reading through them as though they're chapters and not full stories--or maybe it's because it just didn't hit me the right way.

This one just wasn't memorable for me. Maybe in a couple years, I'll revisit Molinard.

[Nicola Whitbread · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shocking and strange, but for the sake of it… Panics is not a book you can enjoy. The stories are dream like fragments, they don’t flow, more is left unsaid than said. Barbara Molinard destroyed almost everything she wrote, and her writing is disturbing; obsessing over death, violence and madness. I didn’t find her writing insightful, merely distasteful. Personally, not for me.

[Regan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An uncomfortable, unsettling little story collection about surreally spiraling anxiety and disconnect, most interesting for its preface (by Marguerite Duras, a longtime friend of Molinard and fervent supporter of her work, about the author's self-destructive behaviors) and its translator's note (by Emma Ramadan, about her discovery of Molinard's work)

[Beth Linfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really bizarre, surreal and imaginative stories. It’s a shame this is her only surviving work as she shredded the rest but it really is some unique art. I think my favourites are: Happiness, The Cage, The Headless Man and I’m Alone and it’s night.

[Eliza K · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” or Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” this one’s for you. An excellent collection of short stories, best classified as psychological horror. The author’s background makes it all the more poignant.

[Mini · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The night is ink; the sky shadow. The birds have stopped singing. A blackbird on a branch dies. The black angels are no longer violent. The demon has entered during sleep. Tomorrow the sun will not rise.”

[Python · Rating 5 out of 5]

This got so good once I got through the truly funky ones at the beginning of the collection. I liked the stories that were surreal but still based in day-to-day experiences.
Favorites:
Taxi, Happiness, I'm Alone and It's Night (god that was disturbing).

[Madi · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’ll be thinking about and rereading the stories in this collection for a long, long time. i’m completely captivated by Molinard’s writing and her story.

[Marco Bermudez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last finished book before Paris, and it’s a book written by a manic, suicidal, and horny French woman which I think encapsulates the French experience pretty well

[Hagai Palevsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I don’t know where I am. The sun is gone. I’m walking along a path I can’t see. The silence is absolute.”

[Pops Baron · Rating 5 out of 5]

easily the best book ive ever read !!!

[Misha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Panics by Barbara Molinard (translated by Emma Ramadan) is the author’s only surviving collection; she destroyed everything else she wrote. This short story collection is less a ‘portrayal’ of mental illness, and more a testimony as the ‘madness’ is lived with a mind completely disintegrating.

How bad an idea was it to read this right after my third big depressive episode of the year? Very, perhaps, because at one point a story induced a full-blown panic attack, and at other times, the collection kept me right on the edge of panic. But maybe it was a good idea too. I wanted to read it to see my own experiences reflected. I first recognised that something was ‘wrong’ with me when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and every year since then has been a journey back and forth. In Molinard’s attempt to make sense of her own intense suffering, I read parts of my own struggles.

Structureless, ambiguous, no start, no end. In each story, the narrator searches, searches, searches for a self that is out of reach, for normalcy and control that have been violently taken from them. This collection doesn’t read like individual stories but like one long absurdist ranting of a mind removed from the ‘normal world’. They feel like episode after episode of a person descending into the abyss.

Reading this was a frightening experience for me, but I also felt strangely distant, as though I were hanging on to a vague feeling of something terrible yet undefined. After a point, it became too repetitive, too vague, to the extent that the fear gave way to bored detachment. Perhaps being too close to the experience caused this. I will never know, because I don’t think I can ever return to this collection.