Now, Now, Louison
Jean Frémon author Cole Swensen translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Les Fugitives
Published:24th Sep '18
Should be back in stock very soon
Tate Modern September Book of the Month. Publication launch with a ticketed event at Tate Modern Bookshop on 4 Oct. 2018, with the author and the translator in conversation with Michèle Roberts. An ideal short text to introduce readers to one of the greatest artists of our time and reveal her to those who know her work already. A deeply feminist book by a seventy-two-year-old male author. Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator and publisher. Her translation of Now, Now, Louison was a French-American Foundation Translation Prize finalist. She was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004 and the recipient of a PEN USA Award for her translation of Fremon's The Island of the Dead. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2019 Listed in The Financial Times' Best Books of 2018: Fiction in translation Listed by Michele Roberts in The Tablet's Best Books of 2018 One of the 5 fiction finalists of the French-American Foundation Translation Awards. Finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Translation
'Louise Bourgeois talks, talks to herself, reviewing the scraps of her long life in all their disorder. This is the portrait, from memory, of a woman who devoted her life to her art, a life that was also the life of the century' writes J. Fremon.Progressing by image and word associations, Fremon evokes Bourgeois's history and inner life, bringing a sense of fascinating and moving proximity to the internationally renowned artist... The art world's grande dame and its shameless old lady, who spun personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks out with her characteristic insolence and wit, and comes to vibrant life again through the words of a most discrete, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and life in America, to her death; her relationships to her family and her young assistant, her views on landmark male artists, the genesis of her own work... through the moods, barbs, resentments, reservations and back, at full speed - this is a phosphorescent account of Bourgeois's life, as could only be captured by the imagination of one artist regarding another.
'A truly wonderful book... The spider woman, the intellectuel, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the good girl sing together in this exuberant, lithe text, beautifully translated by Cole Swensen.' - SIRI HUSTVEDT. `Now, Now Louison draws the reader in with all of the monstrous elegance of a spider, capturing us in the fine web of the creative process, and revealing, with biting wit and lyrical style, the ego, and sacrifices it takes to make monumental work.' - PRETI TANEJA, laureate of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018 for 'We That Are Young'. `Jean Fremon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet.' - PAUL AUSTER. 'Like all the most urgent poetry, it is "fragile and momentary, but momentarily invincible."' JOHN ASHBERY. 'As much a portrait of Bourgeois as it is of one who has outlasted another and is trying, in full knowledge of an impending failure, to reassemble a figure from the fragments. Perhaps life, this life, any life, is best preserved in its many bits, just as it was lived.' - FRIEZE. `Metamorphosing like Arachne, Bourgeois's imagined voice recounts how she wove the detritus of her memory (...) into an art of resistence (...) Now, Now, Louison (a reference to her childhood nickname) is a sensitive portrait of a woman whose struggle for self-definition came to drive her artistic practice.' Financial Times 'The life of Louise Bourgeois is rendered in ellipsis, quick brush strokes, and a mix of associations of ideas and of sensations waltzing with chronology. An original, sensitive text.' - ArtPress.
ISBN: 9780993009389
Dimensions: 180mm x 120mm x 10mm
Weight: 150g
128 pages