Suite for Barbara Loden - Softcover

Léger, Nathalie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997366605 ISBN 13: 9780997366600

Publisher: Dorothy a Publishing Project, 2016

Synopsis

Fiction. Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer and Cecile Menon. "I believe there is a miracle in Wanda," wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. "Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated." It is perhaps this "miracle"--the seeming collapse of fiction and fact--that has made Wanda (1970) a subject of fascination for artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno, and that set acclaimed French writer Nathalie Leger on an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania trying to get closer to the film and its maker. SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN is the magnificent result. Moving contrapuntally between biography and auto-fiction, film criticism and anecdote, fact and speculation, SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN is a stunning meditation on knowledge and self-knowledge, on the surfaces of life and art, and how we come to truth--a kind of truth--not through facts alone but through acts of the imagination.

About this title

Review:

"[A] mesmerizing work of unexpected beauty." Book Riot"

"I am not a movie buff in fact, I rarely watch movies, especially the 'important' ones but I realize I love reading descriptions of film scenes. There's a kind of inert vividness to these descriptions, a scrim between me and the dramatic moment, that I find almost erotic. Leger intersperses descriptions of Wanda with passages about how she came to know this movie, how she tried and tried to understand Barbara Loden herself. Woven into these, too, are autobiographical asides. One begins: 'Once upon a time the man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men.' The result of these combined fragments is delicious and mysterious. Edan Lepucki, "My Year in Reading," The Millions"

"Brilliant little book." Valeria Luiselli"

"Beautifully translated." TLS"

"Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything--biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front...In her combination of the conversational and the incantatory, the fragmentary and the infinite, Leger captures something of [Marguerite] Duras's own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of 'Wanda' are entirely her own."--The New Yorker

"Assigned to write the entry about Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden's art-house movie, for a film encyclopedia, Leger let herself get lost. The result gracefully melds criticism, fiction, and autobiography, and is a powerful example of how summary, channeled through the most personal of perspectives, can be a form of art."--Harper's Magazine

"When I set out to review Suite for Barbara Loden, I realized I didn't have much to say, exactly, beyond what Leger says. I wanted to show how she shows how one woman's experience is filtered through another, collapses into another. And I wanted to show how we (women) connect with Wanda--even extraordinary, glamorous, intellectual women like Leger or Loden, and even women generations younger than Wanda, like myself--how the book sucks in every woman who approaches it."--The Rumpus

"What is initially Leger's explicit hesitance to create a biography that does not do Loden justice is transformed into her own story, one of how the lives of women seep into one another."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"[A] beautiful and intimate mixed portrait of Loden, Wanda, and Leger."--Small Press Book Review

"Moving descriptions of Loden's performance in Wanda dot the narration as Leger struggles to reveal joy or pain Loden may have hidden, beyond her early work as a pin-up girl, her marriage to Elia Kazan, and a 1964 Tony Award for her role in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. Translators Lehrer and Menon give Leger's voice immense verve in English as her small task becomes an obsession."--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author:

Nathalie Leger is an award-winning French author, as well as an editor, archivist, and curator. SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN won the prestigious Prix du livre Inter 2012, voted for by readers across France.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dorothy a Publishing Project
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0997366605
• ISBN 13: 9780997366600
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128