suite for barbara loden by nathalie léger

“The precariousness of the materials that document a life is a central preoccupation in Léger’s triptych of books- Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden, and The White Dress-which are superbly translated by Amanda DeMarco, Natasha Lehrer, and Cécile Menon and published by the excellent small press Dorothy. “Léger’s vigorous work consistently satisfies, with ideas crystallizing with the clarity of a photograph.” - Publisher’s Weekly In the end, the most original performance here is Léger’s, and it is undeniably virtuosic.” -Eula Biss, The New Yorker “With mirrors and lenses, with echoes and silences, Léger’s books suggest that we may write and perform the stories of our lives, but our roles have also been written for us, and have already been performed by other women, whose experiences we may recognize as our own. “In Léger’s hands, desolation can reveal a woman in all her multiplicity-in her ugliness and abasement and determined self-destruction, seemingly ground down to the nubs of her sorrow, but ultimately emerging with a strange richness, full of haunted persistence, droll knowingness, untamed desires, and hardscrabble resilience.” -Leslie Jamison, Bookforum

Read an interview with Nathalie Léger at BOMB. Read Amanda DeMarco on translating Exposition at The Paris Review. Set long before our own “selfie” age, Exposition is a remarkably modern investigation into the curses of beauty, fame, vanity, and age, as well as the obsessive drive to control and commodify one’s image. Here, Léger’s subject is the Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899), who at the dawn of photography dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman in the world, modeling for hundreds of photos, including “Scherzo di Follia,” among the most famous in history. In each, Léger sets the story of a female artist against the background of her own life and research-an archivist’s journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us. Exposition is the first in a triptych of books by the award-winning writer and archivist Nathalie L éger that includes Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress.

Suite for barbara loden by nathalie léger