Contemporary writers

The strangeness of the everyday

Marie Darrieussecq made a dramatic entrance into the small world of French literature. This was in 1996 with Pig Tales, a droll novel about a metamorphosis, the story of a woman who gradually changed into ... a sow. A morality tale, a cross between feminist fable and social satire, which in the space of a few months became a publishing phenomenon and made Marie Darrieussecq a young star of French literature.
Born in Bayonne in 1969, this former pupil of the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure could have repeated herself, seeking success at any price. But, instead this young woman simply proved her love for demanding literary fiction and established a unique style, of metamorphoses and phantoms, with a variety of alchemical mutations between living beings, or between living beings and the elements.
She moved from My Phantom Husband (1998), to Breathing Underwater (1999), then the wonderful A Brief Stay with the Living (2001), in which her virtuosity is at its height. The writing consists of thinking, indeed thoughts, moulding itself around the streams of consciousness of four minds, entering them, mixing present and past, visions and feelings, successfully capturing the impossible - the speed of thought.

To sum her up briefly, Darrieussecq’s work could be described as a modern attempt to inhabit the core of the everyday or to distance oneself from it until its full strangeness is revealed - the ‘Nouveau Roman’ meets Virginia Woolf or James Joyce.
Thus 2002 saw the birth of The Baby - Marie Darrieussecq had just given birth to her first child - a book that treats the "baby" as an object of study, a foreign body, and testifies to a desire to exhaust this subject which, for her, is as literary as any other. White (2003), a scientific and futuristic work, tells the story of love at first sight in the Antarctic, in the ice at the South Pole - and we know to what extent the elements, from cold to hot, from solid to liquid, will metaphorically embody love.
Lastly, with The Country, published in September 2005, Marie Darrieussecq delivers her most autobiographical novel yet, in which she questions the notions of country, frontiers, clan, family and coupledom, in short, belonging and identity. Today she is well and truly one of the major French authors of the younger generation, between Michel Houellebecq and Virginie Despentes. She is also one of the most translated - the strangely human and universal world of Marie Darrieussecq has what it takes to fascinate readers and take them beyond frontiers.

All her books are published by Editions POL and in translation in the UK by Faber & Faber.

Nelly Kaprièlian
journalist on the arts weekly Les Inrockuptibles