Nathalie Léger

Translated by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon

Published on 30 March 2015

Prix du Livre Inter 2012 and winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from the French 2016
Shortlisted for The French-American Foundation Translation Prize 2017
Longlisted for The Albertine Prize 2017

Listed in Guardian Top 10 lists in 2017 by Danielle Dutton, in 2021 by Eula Biss, and in 2023 by Catherine Lacey.

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, the White Review, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, BookForum, and Harper's Magazine.

First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden. Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinéma vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook.

How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer’s evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden’s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator’s rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.

‘Brilliant little book’ — Valeria Luiselli (on Twitter)

‘Léger jump-cuts through time and space with the expertise of a movie director’ — Joanna Walsh

‘An extraordinary book. It reads compulsively and is unlike anything else I have read.’ — Selma Dabbagh

‘Immensely readable, extremely thought-provoking and really quite haunting […] And best of all, it achieves that most elusive feat of never reading like a translation.’ — Lydia Syson

By the same author Exposition (2019) and The White Dress (2020)

128 pages
paperback, 180 x 120 mm
isbn 978-0-9930093-0-3

Two or more items at full price in your basket? Add a note at check out for your free copy of Detour/Détours.

NB: Due to sales restrictions and VAT regulations, this book ships overseas, except countries of the EU, Canada and the USA. For the EU, please use alternative UK or local online retailers. This book is published in North America by Dorothy Project.