Book author: Marie Darrieussecq

Our life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq

Cover of Our life in the Forest by Marie DarrieussecqOk, I admit it, I’m obsessed with Marie Darrieussecq. Hers is the kind of fiction I long for us to write more of and value more highly in England. Regardless of the subject, she is always striving to uncover and express quite what it means to live and breathe as a human. In this novel, she goes further and asks how the surge in population sits not only with human nature but with the planet. Are we able to be social beings on such a grand scale? If we lose touch with the fundamentals of our bestial nature, what do we become? She is also interested in the physical act of writing – how the body is part of the conveyance of narrative – and the primal nature of our desire to record stories in ways that don’t require mass production or electricity i.e. the written word, those early handprints on rock.

In Our Life in the Forest, Marie Darrieusecq contemplates a future in which cloning is used to provide spare organs and body parts for the rich. What does this mean for the clones? Do they have rights? Are they unique individuals despite their genetic replication? Continue reading Our life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq

White by Marie Darrieussecq

Cover of White by Marie DarrieussecqEdmeé and Pete have never met. They come from separate parts of the globe, but White follows their individual journeys to Antarctica and each other.

Why do you sign up for a job in such freezing conditions if you are not a scientist or adventurer seeking some new discovery? What is it that Edmeé and Pete want from the ice and snow, from the endless whiteness that splits champagne bottles in half and requires constant vigilance against for survival? Continue reading White by Marie Darrieussecq

Men by Marie Darrieussecq

The quotation from Marguerite Duras – ‘We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot in order to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible; we couldn’t bear them.’ – echoes throughout Darrieusecq’s novel, Men, and not only because the man that Solange falls in love with requires exactly this kind of devotion, but also because there is a wider echo of Duras’s work, of her interest in the ebb and flow of love, of its journey that always takes the self into unknown territory. I haven’t read The Lover in years but I feel its heart beating in Men.

Solange, the protagonist of Men, is a French actress working in Hollywood. When she meets Kouhouesso, a Canadian actor originally from Cameroon who is consumed by his big project, the making of an African Heart of Darkness, it is as if she has always been waiting only for him. Rose, a friend from home, reminds her that ‘Waiting is an illness. A mental illness. Often a female one.’(location 413)

The novel would be interesting and compelling, an exploration of desire wrapped in the trappings of gender politics, if it looked at a relationship between a man and a woman of the same ethnicity and culture, but Men has a whole extra agenda to explore: race and the politics of skin. Continue reading Men by Marie Darrieussecq