LA BOUCLE

by Eva Figes

" D'un instant à l'autre, je ne sais plus qui je suis. Devant la glace, j'essaie différentes coiffures, je fais des grimaces, je cherche une réponse dans le reflet de mes yeux. Qui sont sombres, solennels, et ne livrent rien. Salut, Anna, dis-je, mais elle ne semble pas me connaître. Ou plutôt, elle ne semble pas se reconnaître quand je dis Anna. J'essaie une autre tactique. Salut Drusilla. Inopinément, elle se met à sourire, ce qui la change du tout au tout. Elle s'illumine de l'intérieur, ses yeux brillent, ce n'est plus le même visage. Ça s'appelle la vivacité. Ça lui va bien. Et une étincelle de malice. Drusilla Hart, auteur remarqué, qui porte les cheveux relevés, de longs pendants d'oreilles et de l'ombre à paupière. L'ombre à paupière, je fais des essais avec, mais il faut que je la retire avant de descendre. Elle, ça lui est égal, mais lui, il joue au père autoritaire. Quelle barbe ! " Enfance, adolescence, maturité, premières découvertes, amours ou révoltes... tout sonne incroyablement juste dans cette évocation sensible et poétique de la vie d'une femme.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Eva Figes (born Eva Unger) is a German-born English author.

Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother. Figes is now a resident of north London and the mother of the academic Orlando Figes and writer Kate Figes.

In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall, which included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

Figes's fiction has certain similarities with the writings of Virginia Woolf. The 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset.

Reviews

[Krizia Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eva Figes is a really good writer...of poems. "The Knot" is very poetic, very melodic? use of words thus it becomes hard to understand at times. I do commend her for making simple life become poetic, worthy of reading but its hard to understand. If it was written in normal prose I might have liked it maybe even loved it. I want to know more about Anna and Daniel but the format of the book made it hard to take a closer look at their personal lives. I can't keep up with the characters that were not "properly" introduced. It felt like I'm thrown into a conversation with people I don't know. I was forced to know them. Anna, on the other hand, I know very well. Aside from us having the same name, the book also showed her deepest emotion. She's weird based on what I've read.

Like Saramago, Eva Figes hates quotation marks but Saramago did it better. This one I just get confused on who's saying what. Eva Figes also hates describing her characters. I can't even imagine the characters properly. Their faces kept on changing.