The Beginners

by Anne Serre, Mark Hutchinson (Translator)

Overview

Quintessential Anne Serre—this restless, prowling novel explores love as a form of greed, and confused need as one shape of bereftness

Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. “How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that’s not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross.”
      Anne Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd—and unforgettable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811230315
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/06/2021
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,051,328
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 7.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

The author of fourteen novels and short story books, Anne Serre was born in 1960. Her work has been acclaimed here as “hypnotic, enchanting” (Publishers Weekly), “tight and fabulist” (Full Stop), and ”strange and beguiling” (Kirkus).

Mark Hutchinson was born in London in 1957 and lives in Paris. Among his many translations are René Char’s Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems.

Editorial Reviews

05/03/2021

Serre (The Governesses) unspools the story of a love affair in her thought-provoking latest. Anna Lore, 43, an art critic living in a small French town with Guillaume, her partner of 20 years, meets scientist Thomas Lenz in a bookshop, while he’s visiting from Bordeaux. They talk about her work and meet again for coffee the next day. Over the next 10 months, Anna and Guillaume’s relationship remains strong, but she continues thinking about Thomas, contrasting Thomas’s quiet sensitivity with Guillaume’s virile, alpha nature. Anna and Thomas maintain sporadic contact through text messages, and it’s no surprise that the two eventually begin sleeping together. What makes Serre’s narrative so layered and complicated is the portrayal of Anna’s psyche: she dreads the prospect of either mourning her old life or possibly embarking on a new one (“Can you return to your origins?” Serre writes. “Not when you’ve been cast out like Eve, weeping, distraught, covering your face in shame in all those frescoes and paintings”). Serre deploys equally acute prose to unpack why Anna perceives a “wound” in Thomas, and why that makes him attractive. This turns a conventional story into something completely and deliciously new. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Her books that have been translated into English—The Governesses, The Fool and Other Moral Tales and The Beginners—have a glamour in the older sense of the word, that of witchcraft. These are books that, in their concern with the properties of fiction—plots, narrator, genre, characters—use these very elements to beguile."

The Point - Rhian Sasseen

"Genuinely original—and, often, very quietly so. Prim and racy, seriously weird and seriously excellent, The Governesses is not a treatise but an aria, and one delivered with perfect pitch."

Parul Seghal

"[A] wry, unconventional novel about a woman's desire."

The New Yorker

"The Beginners is as much a celebration of the dizzying excesses of female desire as Serre’s other work. Even in comparatively realist mode, Serre is a seductress."

Bookforum - Becca Rothfeld