European Women Writers – Serie

When Hillevi, a young, inexperienced midwife, moves from the university town of Uppsala to the wilderness of Svartvattnet (Blackwater) to be with her unofficial fiancé, she is ill prepared for what awaits her. In this frigid, austere, and isolated territory, she encounters the overwhelming and unpredictable forces of nature and demoralizing poverty and ignorance while also gaining access to the unfamiliar world of nomadic Sami reindeer herders. A single traumatic event, never fully confronted, has devastating and far-reaching repercussions, but Hillevi also finds unexpected warmth and love. Incorporating elements of the jojk oral tradition of Sami culture, God’s Mercy is a thoroughly engrossing story about the capriciousness of memory, the resilience of the human psyche, and the endless wonder of the wild.

How, this novel asks, can you imagine the worst when you are young and life is sunny? The answer lies in the telling of The Living, in which a young mother, with her teenage brother, takes her two small children to a deserted quarry on a hot summer afternoon. Seen through the eyes of the brother, Benoît, the drama plays out with all the power and seeming inevitability of classical tragedy, made all the more intense by the blistering heat of the day. On that blazing hot summer day Benoît, to entertain his nephews, seats them in a gondola and sends them down a cableway to the pylon on the other side of the river. The harrowing story of what follows is narrated in Pascale Kramer's artfully simple yet transparent prose, evoking the deep reservoirs of feeling that family members cannot voice, perhaps even to themselves. The Living is filled with the vitality of summer. At the same time, it reveals suffering at its most pure and most volatile as the affected people wonder, in the wake of tragedy, whether they should subsist with the living or with the dead.

Concert was one of the last books published by a Jew in Germany before Hitler came to power. The work is autobiographical, a collection of essays and vignettes that both entertain and engage the reader at a deeper level. Like Robert Schumann's piano suites, each in itself a perfect concert, Else Lasker-Schüler's Concert contains pieces that vary greatly in theme, mood, length, and complexity, yet they are unified by the medium and by the distinct and lyrical personality of the artist. Lasker-Schüler is able to transform and transcend the everyday scenery and events that are her points of departure. She makes magical an unmagical corner of Germany, discerns the miraculous in the neglected and ignored, and finds wisdom and comfort in prayer and cosmic perspective. Lasker-Schüler was attuned to the world and in some ways uncannily prophetic. It may come as a surprise to some readers that Concert, published in German in 1932, contains a warning about the climatic dangers of interfering 'with the merry green leaf people who give us ozone and the breath of life.' With her respect for the natural environment and her emphasis on spiritual development rather than the materialistic, Lasker-Schüler's voice remains relevant to our own times. A recent German edition of her complete works has proven immensely popular.Prior to the Third Reich, Lasker-Schüler had a well-established reputation in her native Germany as a poet, dramatist, and prose writer, as well as for her work in the visual arts, and she received the Kleist Prize for Literature. As a Jew, though, she was increasingly threatened by 'people wearing swastikas,' and was forced to flee the country in 1933, never to return. She died in exile in Palestine in 1945.This is the first English translation of any of Lasker-Schüler's prose: a challenging task because she includes sections in dialect, poems, numerous neologisms, witty alterations of German sayings, and structural emulations with phonetic echoes of famous German art songs.

When pregnant Rosie Carpe, her fatherless five-year-old son in tow, arrives in Guadeloupe looking for her elusive brother, Lazare, the world already seems a plenty confusing place. Could the man who comes to meet her, an elegant black man calling himself Lagrand, actually be her disheveled white brother? Are her parents, who abandoned her in Paris, rediscovering themselves in an outrageous second youth of outlandish affairs, or have they simply lost their minds? And does Rosie have a hope of slipping the sticky grasp of her former employer and seducer, who moonlights as a video pornographer? If it seems unlikely that the feckless Lazare, missing for five years as he followed his own twisted path, might help, or that carnivalesque Guadeloupe, where murder and mayhem are the natural outcomes of “business ventures,” might be the place for Rosie to find peace, then Marie NDiaye may have a few surprises in store for her reader. Amid the blurring boundaries and shifting values, the indistinct realities and confusing certainties of Rosie Carpe, a love story unfolds, and all that is ambiguous and tenuous–in short, all of Rosie’s world–is underpinned with a measure of tenderness.

When Tiffany Murano's parents, French expatriates in Africa, send her to a Catholic boarding school in France, her homeland feels nothing like home. In leaving colonial Africa, she loses the natural world, the people, and the animals she knows and loves. Behind the walls of the Convent of the Slaughterhouse Ladies, Tiffany, whom readers met in Paule Constant's award-winning first novel, Ouregano, leads a life cut off from the world, a life of immutable and ironically secular ritual. She finds solace only in visits to her grandmother's nearby farm, which becomes a sanctuary, paradisial in its isolation. But it is only a matter of time before this magical world is threatened.Based loosely on Constant's own experiences, Private Property is at once deeply moving and intellectually exacting, an exploration of identity, home, and the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters.

The Human Family is the first complete translation of the cycle of ten novellas that Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) wrote between 1895 and 1898. This collection contributes to the rediscovery of Andreas-Salomé's significance as a thinker and writer, above all with regard to her literary contribution to modern feminism and the principles of women's emancipation. Born in St. Petersburg to a German diplomat and his wife, Andreas-Salomé has always been a figure of interest because of her close relationships to influential thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud. Only since the mid-1980s, however, have her prose fiction and theoretical writings been reconsidered as important documents of emerging ideas and debates in twentieth-century feminism. The ten stories of The Human Family drive home her critical perspective on feminine stereotypes. They depict a wide variety of young women as they relate to men representing different degrees of enlightenment and tolerance, struggling to express a complete and independent feminine identity in the face of the confining but often seductive roles that convention and tradition impose on female potential. The Human Family provides a subtle and nuanced perspective on European feminist writing from the turn of the last century by a woman writer who was intimately involved with the literary mainstream of her time and whose theoretical and literary works played a significant role in feminist debates of the period, prefiguring present-day feminist discourse on essentialism and constructivism.

This exciting and comprehensive anthology—the first anthology of German women's fairy tales in English—presents a variety of published and archival fairy tales from 1780 to 1900. These authors of these stories used fairy tales to explain their own lives, to teach children, to examine history, and to critique society and the status quo. Powerful and conflicted females are queens, girls on quests, mothers, daughters, magical wisewomen, and midwives to the fairies; they love, hate, murder, save children, fight tyranny, overcome cannibals, and rescue the working poor. Jeannine Blackwell's introduction places the tales in their historical, social, and critical context, and Shawn C. Jarvis's afterword presents a thematic analysis of the texts and approaches to reading them in conjunction with other European and American tales.

Artemisia Gentileschi, born in 1598, the daughter of an esteemed painter, taught art in Naples and painted the great women of Roman and biblical history. She could neither read nor write, and she was the reviled victim in a public rape trial, rejected by her father, and later abandoned by her husband. Nevertheless, she was one of the first women in modern times to uphold through her work and deeds the right of women to pursue careers compatible with their talents and on an equal footing with men. This edition features a new introduction by the celebrated critic and writer Susan Sontag. Anna Banti, the pen name of Lucia Lopresti, was born in Florence in 1895. Trained as an art historian, she turned to novels, stories, and autobiographical prose in the 1930s. Artemisia, her second novel, published in 1947, is the most acclaimed of the sixteen works of fiction she published during her long life, and is considered a classic of twentieth century Italian literature. Her last, harrowingly confessional novel, A Piercing Cry (Un grido lacerante), appeared in 1981. Banti also wrote art criticism and monographs on painters (Lorenzo Lotto, Fra Angelico, Velázquez, Monet), literary criticism and film reviews, and translated novels by Thackery, Colette, Alain Fournier, and Virginia Woolf. She died in Ronchi di Massa (Tuscanny) in 1985.

How do you live in Algeria when you grow up speaking French, with a French mother? How do you live in France when you've spent your childhood in Algeria with an Algerian father? Tomboy is the story of a girl whose father calls her Brio, whose alter ego is Amine, and whose mother is a blue-eyed blond. But who is she? Born five years after Algerian independence in 1967, she navigates the cultural, emotional, and linguistic boundaries of identity living in a world that doesn't seem to recognize her. In this semiautobiographical novel, the young French Algerian author Nina Bouraoui introduces us to a girl who feels that Algeria is the country of men. Her childhood years spent in Algeria lead her to explore the borderland between genders as she tries to find her balance between nations, races, and identities. With prose modeling the rhythm of the seasons and the sea, Tomboy enters the innermost reality of a life lived on the edge of several cultures.

In writing Le Livre de Promethea HÉlÈne Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory. In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in The Book of Promethea, works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

Rosa Chacel belongs to that brilliant generation of artists that moved to the cultural vanguard in the 1920s and 1930s: García Lorca, Buñuel, Dali, Alberti, Guillén, Aleixandre. As a young artist—a sculptor and writer—she participated in the intellectual ferment of Madrid during those decades. But the victory of fascism in the late thirties erased Chacel's works and the works of other women from the cultural memory until recently. In the interim Chacel was exiled in Brazil and Argentina. At last her work has returned to light. So has Chacel herself.The Maravillas District (Barrio de maravillas, 1976) is the first novel in an autobiographical trilogy and the finest of Chacel's works to date. Proustian in its use of memory (yet unique in style), it traces two girls' discovery of their artistic and intellectual vocations, focusing less on the social and cultural obstacles to women's self-realization--though these are present—than on the invicible impulses of imagination and intellect in these girls' lives and on the enabling power of their mutual support. In its English translation it will rank alongside Virginia Woolf's and Sylvia Plath's autobiographical works depicting the woman artist's experience.

No contemporary French feminist has made a bigger impact in America than HÉlÈne Cixous. Brilliant, bold, and combative, author of numerous novels and a gargantuan study of James Joyce, and sponsor of a series of notorious seminars at the University of Paris about women's writing, she has exploited the roles of femme fatale and maitresse d'education in a career that has been spectacularly defiant and productive.Sihanouk is one of Cixous's most ambitious projects: the dramatic portrayal of the conflicts between old and new, East and West, North and South, religion and politics. At its center is the figure of Norodom Sihanouk. Vain when a prince, as king Sihanouk discovered his responsibility to his country and came to embody Cambodia. He used every means to keep his country growing, healthy, and out of the wars of Southeast Asia that consumed Laos and Vietnam.Cixous recognized in Sihanouk a historical figure as fascinating as a tragic king in Shakespeare: a man of uncommon intelligence on whom his country's history pivoted, a man placed by fate into a world of bad choices and surrounded by powerful and relentless antagonists. But Sihanouk gave Cixous something more: a king who is indisputably modern, who has read and loved Shakespeare, and whose story continues.First published in 1985, the play begins with Sihanouk's abdication in 1955 and ends with his arrest by the Khmer Rouge two decades later. The destiny of an entire country unfolds through the fifty characters who appear on stage.

A masterpiece of modernist fiction about one man’s search for meaning, Dream of Reason (La sinrazón) reveals Rosa Chacel as an intellectual and literary innovator whose work stands alongside that of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf. This meditative novel, grounded in the thinking of Spain’s great modern philosopher Ortega y Gasset, unfolds as the journal of a bourgeois chemist who makes his way in Buenos Aires just before and during the Spanish Civil War. Tracing his relationship with three women, Santiago Hernández explores the power of his own intentions and the limits of human reason. His introspective experiment, set against the background of world-altering events, documents the workings of a self-absorbed mind speculating on the inseparability of self and circumstance and is a brilliant enactment of how, from such tensions, narrative emerges.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1998, this book is the work of one of France's most celebrated and interesting novelists writing at the height of her powers. It is fiction that leads readers through fascinating chambers of life where autobiography is constantly reimagined. A darkly comic novel about four women aging less-than-gracefully, Trading Secrets takes us to an academic conference in Kansas where, in an encounter between Aurore, a French woman, and her American counterpart, Gloria, the differences between their two cultures become sharply apparent. The result is a bitingly funny portrait of painfully complex, psychologically damaged individuals, all of whom have been, in some sense, "colonized." The novel also offers an incisive picture of a French posture toward things American, from race relations to feminism to academia. As Paule Constant herself has said: "C'est un livre en miroir." The book is a mirror, both in how its characters reflect one another and in what it shows us of ourselves and our world.

The letters between a young Dutch woman and a Swiss soldier

After answering a classified ad placed by an import-export company looking for energetic young men willing to take on responsibilities for its African branches—no diploma required—Victor finds himself on The Will of God, a dilapidated boat heading into the heart of darkness as even Conrad couldn't have imagined. With the piquant mixture of hilarity and painful disenchantment characterizing Paule Constant's vision of the "colonial novel," White Spirit follows three innocents—Victor; Lola, a mulatto prostitute; and Alexis, who does not know he's a monkey—as they negotiate the perverse system of desires and hatreds on an African banana plantation. Selling what no one wants or needs, Victor takes delivery of a barrel of mysterious powder promptly christened "white spirit" for its ability to bleach the black arms of the workers handling the shipment. To become whiter and worthier of love, Lola buys some—and then the rest vanishes. In this nightmarish Africa where colonized and colonizers have each other in a stranglehold, the "white spirit" unleashes an obsession that merges whiteness with a return to paradise—an obsession that can only end in catastrophe. Through it all, with her characteristic caustic language, fierce irony, and enormous tenderness for human frailty, Constant portrays the ridiculous without ridicule—and, miraculously, sparks a light of hope in the midst of the torment and suffering.

Claudine Herrmann became famous in France with he publication of Les Voleuses de langue in 1976. Her much-quoted book is now recognized as a modern classic of feminist literary criticism. Nancy Kline's welcome English translation captures the clarity and passion of observations that go beyond books to boudoirs and boardrooms. Herrmann charges that language is the fundamental means by which women are oppressed. Their education forces them to parrot masculine discourse, often gets them dismissed as chatterboxes, and silences their real lives. Women who desire to express themselves creatively are obliged to "steal" language or to invent one of their own. Based on readings of major texts in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences, The Tongue Snatchers illuminates how men and women differ in their experiences of words, work, space, time, love, and sexuality.

This volume is the first anthology of contemporary East German women's writing in English translation. It will introduce scholars and general readers to writers whose voices are essential to an understanding of the situation of women in today's changing Europe. Included are short stories, essays, autobiographical sketches, and excerpts from novels, written between 1974 and 1986 by women of the postwar generation. Their work reflects everyday life in the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall with vitality, sympathy, humor, and warmth. This literature has been of great significance within the GDR as a public forum for social-critical discussion, and in the West for its depiction—as the volume title suggests—of universal issues confronting women in modern society: women and work, women and family, women's self-determination in relation to other people and social institutions. The twenty-five authors represented are Renate Apitz, Irene Böhme, Daniela Dahn, Gabriele Eckart, Christiane Grosz, Monika Helmecke, Helga Königsdorf, Angela Krauss, Katja Lange-Müller, Beate Morgenstern, Irmtraud Morgner, Christa Müller, Doris Paschiller, Helga Schubert, Helga Schütz, Maria Seidemann, Angela Stachowa, Gerti Tetzner, Maxie Wander, Petra Werner, Maja Wiens, Christa Wolf, Christina Wolter, Charlotte Worgitzky, and Rosemarie Zeplin. Notes and biographical introductions are provided for each story.

Like author Linda Lê, the young woman who narrates this novel is from Vietnam and is a writer, a "dirty foreigner writing in French." The narrator has distanced herself not only from Vietnamese society but also from her family. Her story is an exercise in clear-eyed fury revealing three generations of a cursed family. The grandfather was a lunatic the family locked away and declared dead to avoid shame; the father is a failed artist and humiliated cuckold; the mother is a simpering beauty consumed with lust; the uncle is declared insane because of his incestuous love for his sister, who hanged herself. The narrator, on the verge of a profound depression ever since her mother told her she was illegitimate, alternates her story with her uncle's journal. In an acid style burning with compressed lyricism and savage irony, these parallel monologues sketch misfortune's family tree. Linda Lê, who traveled at age fourteen from Saigon to France with a wave of "boat people," is one of the leading young novelists on France's brave new literary scene. Slander is Lê's fifth—and most celebrated—novel.

A work of understated elegance and cumulative power, this novel eases readers into a drama unfolding within a Catholic family in Italy on the eve of World War II. As scenes only dimly understood by the child Lorenza are revisited by the woman she becomes, what seemed a family affair—a romance involving Lorenza's mother, her father's Jewish friend Arturo, and her aunt Margot in Switzerland—begins to reveal the broader outlines of the drama of history, in particular the tragedy of Italy's Jews during the Holocaust. Limning the interplay of past and present, of memory and presence, this haunting work by one of Italy's foremost writers brings to life the subtleties and complexities of history as it is experienced, interpreted, and relived within the most intimate of realms.

In La función delta (1981), the second novel of the best-selling Spanish author Rosa Montero, the real world is as unmapped and treacherous as ever for her countrywomen, but more universal concerns impinge. Translated into English by Kari Easton and Yolanda Molina Gavilán, The Delta Function explores a woman's fears of being abandoned, of being alone, and of dying. A unique double narrative structure throws into relief time's effect on her self-identity, sexuality, and relations with others. Readers will be inspired to confront and rethink their own version of the world around them.

The Forbidden Woman tells the story of Sultana, an Algerian woman doctor who, after years spent living in France, returns to her native village in order to attend the funeral of a former lover. The clash between her origins and the Westernized life she now leads is explored in telling detail against the backdrop of current events in Algeria. A work that combines insight into both political and personal matters, The Forbidden Woman develops a complex portrait of a country torn between progress and prejudice, secular life and Islamic fundamentalism. In this passionate book, Malika Mokeddem places special emphasis on the position of women in modern Algeria. The frequent indignities and injustices suffered by the narrator reflect the plight of women in a society marked by patriarchalism and religious fundamentalism. Yet the novel also suggests that, along with modernization, there are emerging demands for women's rights in Algeria—demands that might well signal a vastly different future for this tormented nation.

Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta MÜller’s childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child’s often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and, at the same time, capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state.

In an autumnal love story of erotic obsession, possessiveness, remembrance, oblivion, and time, an elderly woman dwells upon a failed love affair of some time past, when she was no longer young but not yet old. The narrator relives meeting her lover, Franz, at the natural history museum, when, for the first time in her life, she experiences all-consuming love and absolute happiness. Ultimately the affair founders because of her inability to believe that Franz will actually leave his wife. After he disappears from her life, she withdraws from the world, waiting for his return and revisiting their time together over and over in a never-ending cycle of obsession. Her love for Franz becomes a compulsive suffering from which she can neither free herself nor withhold anything.

Set in the German Democratic Republic of the early 1970s, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice—a landmark novel now translated into English for the first time—is a highly entertaining adventure story as well as a feminist critique of GDR socialism, science, history, and aesthetic theory.In May 1968, after an eight-hundred-year sleep, Beatrice awakens in her Provence château. Looking for work, she makes her way to Paris in the aftermath of the student uprisings, then to the GDR (recommended to her as the "promised land for women"), where she meets Laura Salman, socialist trolley driver, writer, and single mother, who becomes her minstrel and alter ego. Their exploits—Beatrice on a quest to find the unicorn, Laura on maternity leave in Berlin—often require black-magic interventions by the Beautiful Melusine, who is half dragon and half woman.Creating a montage of genres and text types, including documentary material, poems, fairy tales, interviews, letters, newspaper reports, theoretical texts, excerpts from earlier books of her own, pieces by other writers, and parodies of typical GDR genres, Irmtraud Morgner attempts to write women into history and retell our great myths from a feminist perspective.

When Céleste Mogador's memoirs were first published in 1854 and again in 1858, they were immediately seized and condemned as immoral and unsuitable for public consumption. For a reader in our more forgiving times, this extraordinary document offers not only a portrait of the early life of an intelligent, courageous, and infinitely intriguing Frenchwoman but also an exceedingly rare inside look at the world of the courtesans and prostitutes of nineteenth-century France. Writing to conciliate judges and creditors, Mogador (born Céleste Venard in 1824) explains how with tenacity, wit, and audacity, she managed to escape a difficult childhood and subsequent life of prostitution to become, successively, a darling of the dance halls, a circus rider, and an actress, all the while attracting wealthy young men who vied for her favor. Although her account gives readers a peek into the rakish demimonde made famous by Verdi's opera La Traviata, its greatest value lies in its candid picture of a spunky, self-educated woman who doggedly transformed herself into an esteemed and prolific novelist and playwright, who fell in love with a count and married him, and who made her name synonymous with the bohemian life of the 1840s and 1850s in Paris.

What first appears as a tiny moving shadow, no bigger than a fly, on the dazzling horizon slowly reveals itself as the grim shape of violence and death; in the destruction left behind—the mother’s broken body, the hidden child, the crying infant—begins the story of wandering and loss, of exile and desolation that sounds all the sad echoes of disappearing Bedouin life. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, Malika Mokeddem’s Century of Locusts combines the magic of exquisitely wrought desert landscapes, the intrigue of Bedouin tales of madmen and poets, and the personal pain of exile and isolation to evoke a way of life destroyed by the scourge of settler colonialism. The book tells the braided tales of those left to resist: a wandering poet and his mute, stricken daughter, Yasmine; the lunatic Majnoun; and Majnoun's murderous sidekick, Hassan, who twitches and squints with malevolence, lurking along the story’s shadowy borders. Rippling ever outward with allusions and echoes, the tale eventually encompasses Algeria’s legendary past, its colonial injustices, and its uncertain future, even as Mokeddem’s poetry and deft touch confer life and hope on the ravaged body of this desert land.

When pregnant Rosie Carpe, her fatherless five-year-old son in tow, arrives in Guadeloupe looking for her elusive brother, Lazare, the world already seems a plenty confusing place. Could the man who comes to meet her, an elegant black man calling himself Lagrand, actually be her disheveled white brother? Are her parents, who abandoned her in Paris, rediscovering themselves in an outrageous second youth of outlandish affairs, or have they simply lost their minds? And does Rosie have a hope of slipping the sticky grasp of her former employer and seducer, who moonlights as a video pornographer? If it seems unlikely that the feckless Lazare, missing for five years as he followed his own twisted path, might help, or that carnivalesque Guadeloupe, where murder and mayhem are the natural outcomes of “business ventures,” might be the place for Rosie to find peace, then Marie NDiaye may have a few surprises in store for her reader. Amid the blurring boundaries and shifting values, the indistinct realities and confusing certainties of Rosie Carpe, a love story unfolds, and all that is ambiguous and tenuous–in short, all of Rosie’s world–is underpinned with a measure of tenderness.

Bordeaux, a shrewd and moving portrayal of life in contemporary Europe, is the first novel to appear in English by Soledad Puértolas, one of the most acclaimed writers in Spain today. A novel that subtly takes the measure of our time, Bordeaux traces the fates of three people: Pauline Duvivier, an elderly woman who lives a solitary life in a tranquil suburb of Bordeaux; René Dufour, a Frenchman involved in unfulfilling relationships with several women; and Lilly Skalnick, a young American woman traveling in Europe. Their stories, which take place in France and elsewhere throughout Europe and the United States, intersect in seemingly random yet revealing ways, gradually forming a complex social portrait. Unifying all their stories are the themes of loneliness, restlessness, and the search for meaning in a world in which neither the past nor the present offers firm answers or lasting consolations.