Awards

• Winner of PEN Translates Award 2018 (Australia)

Overview

The Baby is a mother’s project and a writer’s project—how to reconcile these two demanding roles? What is a baby? And why are there so few of them in literature? Through notes taken in the months after her first child was born, Darrieussecq, in her characteristically ingenious style, makes observations that will bring smiles and grimaces of recognition, and raise important questions. Along with the banal drudgery of childcare, there is the euphoria, the obsession, the terror and the visceral focus on the body. Arguing with ‘Saint de Beauvoir’, Darrieussecq examines how women as mothers are targeted from all angles. How, she asks, can a woman be more and other than a mother?

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9781911231264

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Reviews

`There are few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.' * The Times on Men * `The reader will be captivated by Darrieussecq's hypnotic style.' * Le Monde on Our Life in the Forest * `Without seeming to, Marie Darrieussecq gives us an example of what literature can achieve. It is a rare thing.' * Humanite * `An enchanting book...moving, funny, profound. And never sentimental.' * Madame Figaro *

`Darrieussecq evokes the awe, fear and weirdness of motherhood, the demolition of certainty, an instinct for rapture. She puts her hand in the great dark lake of maternal experience and scoops up filigrees of the phosphorescent memory all mothers share, turns them gleaming in the light of her words, one after another. I was disturbed, envious, enthralled.' * Kate Holden, author of In My Skin and The Romantic * `There are few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.' * The Times on Men * `The reader will be captivated by Darrieussecq's hypnotic style.' * Le Monde on Our Life in the Forest * `Without seeming to, Marie Darrieussecq gives us an example of what literature can achieve. It is a rare thing.' * Humanite * `An enchanting book...moving, funny, profound. And never sentimental.' * Madame Figaro *

Author Information

Marie Darrieussecq is a French writer born in Bayonne in 1969. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was published in 1996 and translated into thirty-five languages. She has written more than twenty books. In 2013 she was awarded both the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men. She lives in Paris. Penny Hueston has translated four earlier books by Marie Darrieussecq: All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn and Our Life in the Forest. 

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