Suite for Barbara Loden

by Nathalie Léger, Natasha Lehrer (Translator), Cécile Menon (Translator)

Overview

The second in Nathalie Léger’s acclaimed genre-defying triptych of books about the struggles and obsessions of women artists.

“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 cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780997366617
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/17/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nathalie Léger is the award-winning author of Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress, as well as an editor and archivist. She has curated exhibitions on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett for the Centre Pompidou, and is Director of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, an organization dedicated to preserving the archives of modern French writers.

Editorial Reviews

08/01/2016
In Léger’s associative, meditative novel, what we can know of one another is whatever we can imagine. Asked to write a short encyclopedia entry about the American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden, Léger’s narrator becomes “carried away,” unable to stick to the basic, established facts of Loden’s life, or even to what appears “imperfect, individual, accidental” about her subject. Accordingly, Léger eschews the brief encyclopedia assignment, instead structuring the text like a musical composition in which certain notes sound again and again. Unable to access Loden’s journals, the narrator writes scene-by-scene descriptions of Loden’s single film, 1970’s Wanda, interspersing these with scenes from her own investigation, which brings her to New York, Connecticut, and “soot-stained” Pennsylvania coal country, where Wanda was shot. A novel by Loden’s husband, the director Elia Kazan, seems to be full of “things Barbara used to talk about,” and an actress friend quotes Flaubert, suggesting that “everything we invent is the truth.” But Barbara herself remains elusive: “A woman... pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another... playing not herself but a projection.” Loden said she made her film “as a way of confirming my own existence”; brief appearances by the narrator’s mother, another woman who, like Wanda’s heroine, once found herself adrift, will suggest to readers that the search for another is also our common, constant labor: the creation of a self. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

With mirrors and lenses, with echoes and silences, Léger’s books suggest that we may write and perform the stories of our lives, but our roles have also been written for us, and have already been performed by other women, whose experiences we may recognize as our own. In the end, the most original performance here is Léger’s, and it is undeniably virtuosic.” —Eula Biss, The New Yorker

“In Léger’s hands, desolation can reveal a woman in all her multiplicity—in her ugliness and abasement and determined self-destruction, seemingly ground down to the nubs of her sorrow, but ultimately emerging with a strange richness, full of haunted persistence, droll knowingness, untamed desires, and hardscrabble resilience.” —Leslie Jamison, Bookforum

“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, Léger captures something of [Marguerite] Duras's own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of ‘Wanda’ are entirely her own.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Assigned to write the entry about Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden's art-house movie, for a film encyclopedia, Léger 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.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper's

“Inventive and affecting, it takes both the novel and the biography to new and interesting places.” —Eimear McBride

“Brilliant little book.” —Valeria Luiselli

“Léger’s vigorous work consistently satisfies, with ideas crystallizing with the clarity of a photograph.” —Publishers Weekly

“I’ve just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, translated by Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by Amanda Demarco. All three defy categorisation—history, essay, memoir, fiction. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works very much.” —Catherine Lacey

“This trilogy feels more than a feminist recovery of narrative: it is a method through which the lives of women artists are reimagined and remade through the writer herself, a mode of hospitality in which lives coalesce and transform one another.” —Katie Da Cunha Lewin, The White Review

“Highbrow but highly readable.” —ELLE (France)

“The word triptych, not trilogy. Because the books are not a straight line. The books scoff at straight lines, reveal how any line can look straight if you’re zoomed too far in. The books are not discrete episodes, they are all one thing, they are all one project.” —Kyle Williams, Full Stop

“With ferocity and pathos, Léger enters into a standing-with relationship with these other women only to realize she’s been in touch with herself the entire time. This feels to me like the natural movement of the most revelatory art criticism—to move close to the work, to ride along then pierce the work’s textured surface into its mysterious netherworld then looping back out (through innards) towards these words you hear out there in the private distance only to find them coming from your own mouth. With all of these women—Countess of Castiglione, Barbara Loden and Wanda (and Alma H. Malone), and Pippa Bacca—Léger comes to know them as women who lived rich lives, artists’ lives, intensely felt.” —Jay Ponteri, Essay Daily

“The suffocating interpolations of being a woman have concealed the words of so many: Pippa Bacca, whose seemingly naive project is now bound to her rape and murder; American actor and director Barbara Loden, whose project of semi-autobiographical film Wanda details the listlessness of life for the 1970s American housewife; The Countess of Castiglione, whose hope had been to exhibit her photos at the upcoming 1900 International Exposition; and Léger’s own mother, whose words ‘too have been hidden away.’ The triptych not only unearths the lost narratives of noted women; but more significantly the writers’ reckoning with her own mother—’I never helped her, I never stood up for her’—suggests that the triptych’s aim is to give voice to one woman: her mother.” —Clancey D’Isa, Chicago Review of Books

“Now that all three books exist in English thanks to Dorothy Project and exceptional translations by Natasha Lehrer and Amanda DeMarco, it feels as if the stakes have been tripled. Though each book is a case study of a particular woman’s life, the neat boundaries of these subjects aren’t meant to hold. ‘On the winding path of femininity,’ Léger writes, ‘the loose stone you stumble over is another woman.’ These slippages are part of the danger and excitement of Léger’s work—look long enough at another woman, and you may find yourself looking in a mirror.” —Laura Marris, On the Seawall

From the Publisher

2016-07-27
French writer Léger muses on the life and work of American filmmaker Barbara Loden (1932-1980).Loden directed one film, Wanda, which she wrote and starred in. Assigned to write “a short entry” about the movie for a film encyclopedia, Léger says she,“kept being carried away by the subject.” Her interest grows after learning Loden based Wanda on “a newspaper story she had read about a woman convicted of robbing a bank,” who “thanked the judge” when given a 20-year prison sentence. “[What] pain, what hopelessness could make a person desire to be put away?” Léger wonders, “How could imprisonment be relief?” Moving descriptions of Loden’s performance in Wanda dot the narration as Léger 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 Léger’s voice immense verve in English as her small task becomes an obsession. “You think you’re dealing with pure formalities, footnotes...then somehow you end up with endless decisions to make, with abandoned hopes and collapsed hyphotheses.” Even a trip to the Pennsylvania coal-mining towns where Wanda was filmed yields no eureka moment. While Léger accepts that Loden is an elusive myth, this hybrid text mirroring that elusiveness fails to reveal what Léger actually found so fascinating. “When Wanda came out in 1970 feminists hated it,” Léger notes, saying it had “no self-awareness, no pioneering mythology of the free woman.” But the film had fans in Europe, including Marguerite Duras, who said of the final scene in Wanda, “I see a kind of glory there, a very powerful glory, very violent, very profound.”Loden fans will enjoy Léger’s riffs; others may find the obsession mystifying.

Kirkus Review