Emmanuelle PaganoReseñas

What is Love? It is a question which poets and philosophers have long enjoyed grappling with, but whose answer remains as elusive as ever. Even if we were to consider just one type of Love - that between lovers, between partners - its manifestations are incredibly varied. Every couple has its own love story.

Emmanuelle Pagano's "Trysting" was originally published in French as "Nouons-nous". It is now available in an English translation by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis, issued by independent publishers And Other Stories. Trysting is an exploration of romantic and erotic love presented in a series of poetic vignettes in which different narrators describe aspects of their relationship. Very few of the entries exceed one page, most consist of a short paragraph, some are just one-line aphorisms. The protagonists are ordinary people from all walks of life. Only once are we allowed to guess the identity of the narrator - and that turns out to be a historical figure, explorer Lady Franklin. Frankly, this exception jars - one of the most delightful aspects of Trysting is that the couples who people it could be us, or the spouses who live down the road.

This book is as hard to define as love itself. Is it a novel? A short story collection? An anthology of prose poetry? Flash fiction? Perhaps it could be considered a "mockumentary" or fictional "vox pop". Yet, despite the variety of the lifestories and feelings evoked (happiness, loss, parting, pleasure, desire, indecision, peace, comfort, pain) there is little attempt to differentiate the narrative style. It is as if the protagonists of the book whispered their secrets to the author and entrusted her to weave them into one poetic garland, rendered in the writer's own unmistakable voice.

This is a special book which, whilst recognising and describing the heartache relationships can cause, bravely celebrates the gloriously ordinary joys of Love.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2020/10/trysting-by-emmanuelle-pagano.html

What is Love? It is a question which poets and philosophers have long enjoyed grappling with, but whose answer remains as elusive as ever. Even if we were to consider just one type of Love - that between lovers, between partners - its manifestations are incredibly varied. Every couple has its own love story.

Emmanuelle Pagano's "Trysting" was originally published in French as "Nouons-nous". It is now available in an English translation by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis, issued by independent publishers And Other Stories. Trysting is an exploration of romantic and erotic love presented in a series of poetic vignettes in which different narrators describe aspects of their relationship. Very few of the entries exceed one page, most consist of a short paragraph, some are just one-line aphorisms. The protagonists are ordinary people from all walks of life. Only once are we allowed to guess the identity of the narrator - and that turns out to be a historical figure, explorer Lady Franklin. Frankly, this exception jars - one of the most delightful aspects of Trysting is that the couples who people it could be us, or the spouses who live down the road.

This book is as hard to define as love itself. Is it a novel? A short story collection? An anthology of prose poetry? Flash fiction? Perhaps it could be considered a "mockumentary" or fictional "vox pop". Yet, despite the variety of the lifestories and feelings evoked (happiness, loss, parting, pleasure, desire, indecision, peace, comfort, pain) there is little attempt to differentiate the narrative style. It is as if the protagonists of the book whispered their secrets to the author and entrusted her to weave them into one poetic garland, rendered in the writer's own unmistakable voice.

This is a special book which, whilst recognising and describing the heartache relationships can cause, bravely celebrates the gloriously ordinary joys of Love.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2020/10/trysting-by-emmanuelle-pagano.html

Un petit livre à l’écriture aussi fine que de la soie marine. Autour d’un objet, un châle de soie marine ayant appartenu à sa tante et désormais au musée, la narratrice raconte son père et sa famille, le patriarcat italien et le fascisme.

Un bijou de délicatesse finement tissé

Emmanuelle Pagano is the author of fifteen novels, and lives in the Ardèche in South-east France. One Day I'll Tell You Everything won the European Prize for Literature in 2009, but although the prize includes support for translation, it has taken all this time for it to be available in English. And that is a real pity because this book tackles a delicate issue with great sensitivity.

Pagano's evocation of the remote mountains where Adèle drives her bus is stunning. The novel spans September to February of the following year so much of her route traverses freezing conditions as she picks up both primary and secondary students to deliver them to their schools. There are regular warnings about snow storms and alterations to her usual route because of landslips, but ploughing on through snow and fog is routine. You can see the translator's skill in this passage:

The autumn you read about in books doesn't last. The flamboyant colours, the lyrical oranges of the beech trees, the brilliant ochres of the willows, the sun-speckled acid greens on the birches, the deep reds bleeding into scarlet of the maple forests, or conversely the sparkling, pointillist reds of the individual maples standing out among the yellows of the other trees—there's just time for me to describe it, time for the wind to send a few leaves back to the ground, and two or three more trips with my kids, and it's over. It's over on the ground as well as on the branches. (p.57)

On Adéle's trips, autumn is soon enough a display of dreary colours that match the fog. In the old days, children used to walk to local schools, but with the decline of village life in rural France, these schools have closed and now the children have a long journey every day. Each one of them is an individual to Adéle, and she cares about them all. Her life as their driver is solace for the loss of a most important relationship. Her brother Alex was angry about her transition from male to female: he grieves the loss of his big brother, but he refuses to acknowledge her as his sister. So she left the city to come to a place where she is accepted as a woman because no one knows her history.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/06/12/one-day-ill-tell-you-everything-by-emmanuell...

This is a set of inter-related short stories, rather than a novel. Frequently an incident in one story is related by another person, from an alternate perspective, in another story. They are all related in the first person and, at times, it took a while to work out who the speaker was, male or female, young or old, and older or younger self compared to another of the stories. It was trancelike in its effect, leaving you always peering at the truth through a distorting mirror - what is real and what is not? At times the tellers themselves are not clear in their own mind. The depiction of the roadside looney and his waiting for an event that can never occur is one example of the mental uncertainty that exists here.
The last story in the book was the most isolated, but the most personal, in that it related directly to the act of reading and interacting with other readers of the same books. That was worth waiting for.

Downbeat with Some Dark Humour
Review of the pre-release paperback (2019) (136pp) translation of selections from the French language original "Un renard à mains nues" (2012) (A Fox With Bare Hands) (340pp)

As explained by the excellent translators Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis in their afterword to Faces..., this collection of stories has been chosen based on character and incident connections i.e. where each story references people from another one. This tightens the bonds of the book turning it into a novel-in-short-stories. It also helps it adhere to the readable-in-one-sitting house style of Peirene Press.

It does seem though that the resulting selection has made this more of a depressing and downbeat affair with a few too many stories revolving around hitchhikers lurking or planning suicides on hidden highway approaches and/or the strangling of foxes with bare hands (to put a mortally injured animal out of its misery). I certainly did not feel like reading this in one sitting as it just became too depressing after a while. Spreading it over several days may cause one to miss some of the internal cross-references though. You can see from a comparison to the French original (340pp) that almost 2/3rds of the stories have been dropped in the translation (136*pp). I wonder if any of those had a bit more joy and happiness to them?

I mostly enjoyed "The Automatic Tour-Guide" with its permanent gîte**-resident spinner of local tourist trivia tales (partially invented by themselves) and "The Dropout" with its wedding crasher.

Faces... is part of Peirene Press's subscription series where direct purchases from the publisher are shipped 1-2 months in advance of the official publication date and availability through other retailers. Faces... will be officially published October 22, 2019.

* 136pp is the official page count from the publisher, but I have the book in hand and it is only 128pp even if you count the 4 unnumbered pages at the back end.
** small furnished tourist cabins or houses in rural France.

I adore this little book! A series of short writings, from single lines to a couple of pages, on the subject of attraction, love, hurt, separation and loss. They perfectly capture the small often overlooked quirks of relationships that distinguish and cement them. While the characters in the passages differ, as you read through, later parts reflect and refract early ones. I gulped down the whole book in a single day, but it is equally good for dipping in and out of. Jennifer Higgens and Sophie Lewis' translation brings the writing perfectly into English with all its small beauty and good humour. Whether you call it vignettes, linked writings, prose poems, or uncategorisable, it is gorgeous and set to be my favourite book of 2016.

Le plateau de l'Ardèche, en hiver, avec ses rudesses, sert de trame de fond à cette histoire qui se tisse de relations entre une poignée d'adolescents et d'enfants et la conductrice de la navette qui chaque jour les emmène l'école. On glisse dans les pensées d'Adèle, tourmentée par son passé, par son adolescence douloureuse dans un corps mal ajusté qu'elle a depuis changé et dont l'arrivée du frère ravive le souvenir.

Un roman plutôt intéressant sur les corps, sur les petits rien qui font le quotidien et sur les souvenirs qui font les tourments. Reste qu'on retient plutôt un sentiment de dispersion qu'autre chose, alors qu'on voudrait que l'auteur aille plus loin. Peut-être n'est-je pas été suffisamment sensible au secret que porte la narratrice, plus attaché par les détails, par ces pointes de vies qu'Emmanuelle Pagano distille en regardant la nature, les enfants, les adolescents qu'elle transporte avec elle. A mon goût, ce roman manque un peu d'écriture, même si la balade nous transporte.