Nathalie Léger
Nathalie Léger was born in 1960 and is the author of several short experimental novels based on her research work as a curator, as well as a volume of illustrated, aphoristic flash-fiction, published under a pseudonym. The director of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), which gather archives and studies related to the main French publishing houses, she lives and works in Paris and in Caen. She curated to Pompidou Centre exhibitions on Roland Barthes and on Samuel Beckett in 2002 and 2007.
Her UK debut Suite for Barbara Loden garnered intense critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and was translated in to several European languages. It is credited as being instrumental to the re-release, in American film theatres, of Barbara Loden’s cult masterpiece Wanda (1970). Together with The White Dress, her second novel Exposition will be published in the US later this year for the 10th anniversary of Dorothy Project, an American independent literary press publishing only two books a year.
Suite for Barbara Loden was translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon., Exposition was translated by Amanda DeMarco, The White Dress was translated by Natasha Lehrer.
Related articles and media:
On translating Nathalie Léger’s Exposition, ‘Obsession’ by Amanda DeMarco, written for The Paris Review.
‘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, iNews
‘Léger’s writing is concerned with the value of its own creation, of its possibility to respond to what she terms elsewhere the ‘annihilation’ of narrative through male violence. This writing is made through doubt about its own capacities, and its own efficacies. But I think there is a benefit to faltering at the possibilities of expression.’
— Katie Da Cunha Lewin, The White Review
‘it’s interesting to note the complex, often unlikeable nature of Léger’s characters: the author’s own self-interrogations have drawn her to those who, like her mother, like Léger herself, are not strong, straightforward, feminist heroes. Instead, they are women who, resolved as they are to eschew the determining nature of the male gaze, to reject their traditional exhibitionist role, continue to struggle with their own sense of being.’
— Rachel Andrews, The Stinging Fly
