The BURIED Book Club discussion

Gisèle Prassinos

Biography by Michael Richardson, from a Writers No One Reads entry:

"The entry of Gisèle Prassinos (born 1920) into the Surrealist circle at the age of 14 has gained a legendary status. Born into what had been a wealthy and cultured Greek family which was forced to move to France to avoid persecution during hostilities between Greece and Turkey when Gisèle was only two (her father had to sell his library of 100,000 books to pay for the journey), she grew up in a difficult but stimulating environment that is reflected in her work. Aside from her novels, stories and poems, she also creates objects, particularly in fabric, and has translated Kazantzakis into French."

GR lists 9 distinct works (2 are Surrealist anthologies) with a total of 38 ratings and 4 reviews (all of the anthologies).

In January of this year (2014), Black Scat Books published Surrealist Texts, a limited edition (only 85 copies, tragically) of what appears to be the only collection of her early Surrealist work available in English.

No GR record for this yet, but I just ordered it and will create a record once it arrives.

A review of the book can be found here.

A few other links:

Blog post with unfortunately dead links to a PDF titled Selected Short Works of Gisèle Prassinos, Translated and Introduced by Sarah Kalikman Lippincott. This appears to have been a thesis...will work on tracking down its hopefully continued online existence. This post also mentions a novel, The Traveller, that was translated into English, although the description does not make it sound Surrealist at all.

Chapter (via Google Books) in André Breton: The Power of Language on Trouver sans chercher, a collection of Prassinos' Surrealist work (n/a in English), which reports that Prassinos stopped writing for 10 years after WWII and when she began again her style had veered from Surrealism to only showing some Surrealist influence (which partly explains the description of The Traveller in the blog post above).

Another blog post with full-text of a (very) short story titled Journoir (Blackday)

Chapter on Prassinos from Surrealism and Women, via Google Books

I added the Wikipedia bio to her author page and hope to do some additional librarian work as time permits.

Whoa, Prassinos is finally getting translated?! I was also alerted to her via that Writers No One Reads post, and I've read her in anthology a few times (I just added her as an author to Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, the other big collection she turns up in), but of course was never able to find anything much else in English (re: the Traveler... talk about being damned by praise -- that quote makes it sound so dull, but yeah, it also seems late and outside her surrealist period).

Thanks for the heads up Sean! I may also have to jump on this, too.

You're welcome! Hoping it will live up to its promise.

I just created a record for the new collection from Black Scat. It's a beautiful book!

The story "The Crazy Index Finger" in this collection is totally horrifying and amazing in less than a page!

So this time I actually know exactly who we've lost here. Anyone know what's become of Sean?

Nate D wrote: "So this time I actually know exactly who we've lost here. Anyone know what's become of Sean?"

Of Australia? He's been absent for a rather long time. specifics I don't have.

Well, a month and a half. He'll be missed. I'm blaming Amazon.

Nate D wrote: "Well, a month and a half. He'll be missed. I'm blaming Amazon."

Oh wait. I might have the wrong Sean. Australian Sean was gone before that. (You'd think I new how to read more closely ; )

Ali wrote: "the one who posted this thread, contributed all the information about Gil Orlovitz to the BBC"

I had suspected something was amiss. Damn.

Sean Stewart left. I wrote to him and he said:

Yeah, I left the site about a month ago. I'm terrible with goodbyes so I didn't let anyone know I was leaving. Sorry about that. I'd been thinking about leaving for a long time, ever since the Amazon takeover. I don't like Amazon's business practices and I don't want them having my content for free. And for me, there's no point in being on there unless I'm writing reviews. I think Amazon will turn the site into even more of a marketing machine than it already is. Beyond that, I was finding it kind of distracting to be on GR. My job involves a lot of time at the computer, so the less reasons I have to go online the better.

I owe my GR friends a huge debt for all the good literature they turned me on to (most certainly including you, so thank you). I will miss that aspect of being on the site. For that reason I did open an account at LibraryThing so at least I have somewhere to do reading research.

Thank for inquiring, and I hope you're doing well. I'm slowly working my way through the festschrift and enjoying it immensely.

Ah, that's all good to know, though a shame. Thanks for posting that MJ. I'll go post a memorial review of this book now.

Wakefield's much more complete collection The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories, 1934--1944 has been out for three weeks now! Still no reviews?

I went ahead and ordered a copy as it looks to go much more in-depth than prior collection (and I'm curious about the novellas -- will they add a greater coherency through longer development? This remains to be seen).

I also ordered an old hardcover of her only translated novel from her post-Surrealist period. In synopsis it may sound fairly run-of-the-mill, but I'm hoping to pinpoint vestiges of her earlier style lurking in its shadowy recesses.

I wish I'd opted to read the Prassinos collection instead of Leiris's Aurora, which has pretty much convinced me to stick to reading only women surrealist writers going forward.

And for anyone who'd like a Prassinos preview, five of her stories can be found in The Custom House of Desire, free for download via the Internet Archive.

I can see how that might have been. I think I read Leiris' The Cardinal Points in anthology, but the experience has near-entirely escaped my memory one year later. Looking forward to more Prassinos instead, though!

The Traveler is quite good. Far more modernist than surrealist, but with an effective crosscutting of memory and micro-sliced present with at times nightmarish moments of recollection to capture a child's experience of a WWII in Vichy Paris, in hiding without fully understanding that she was or why. A bit like Franco Spain in School of the Sun, though less intensely crystalized and more quotidian in is concerns in general.

Was it merely to set myself at rest, or to prove my extraordinary compassion for her that I slipped my hand through the opening of the door, into her vision and hearing, towards the perceptions of her skin . . . towards whatever was still left of her, if anything was still left?
It was at that point that I underwent that cruel horror which instinctively drove me to withdraw my fingers from the shadows into which I had plunged them. They were covered with warm blood and my eyes were riveted on the upper joints of two of them by the sharp furrows cut by my despairing fingernails.

The new massive Prassinos collection from Wakefield is all pretty great. I think I prefer the translations to those of the prior small collection, and the wider breadth of her work, from absurdist sketches and portraits to more involved later works that dance around more familiar story archetypes, is great. She's still a deeply irrational surrealist, so don't expect coherent narrative finesse on the order of a Leonora Carrington for instance, but this is a key document of early/interwar surrealist storytelling, favorably sitting alongside Benjamin Peret's The Leg of Lamb, perhaps.