ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A genre-defying account of confinement and its literary echoes through history.
As the pandemic sweeps through Paris in March 2020, the writer HC faces a choice: stay in Paris or flee to the countryside? The weight of historical responses bears down on her—those of her ancestors and Jewish writers during moments of persecution.
Still uncertain, she flees to the country at the last moment, with her cats and her daughter, with her diaries and notebooks. What will she do here? Write? What will she write about? Can she write about the experience of being confined? She will write about her cats; every day she will observe their lives and take notes about how they cope with being housebound, and later, in the spring, with the outdoors.
Thucydides, Defoe, Camus, Kafka—she will compare her experiences with those of others who have been confined by malady or persecution. She will write of her mother, who fled impending disaster on many occasions and always kept a suitcase ready.
She too will endure. The important thing is to have a good death, surrounded by those she loves, not locked down in a hospital.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Hélène Cixous is professor emeritus of literature at the Université Paris VIII, where she founded and directed the Centre de recherches en études féminines. She is the author of more than seventy works of fiction, plays, and collections of critical essays; recent titles in English translation include Well-Kept Ruins, We Defy Augury, and Tomb(e). Beverley Bie Brahic is a Paris-based translator and author of four collections of poetry, including White Sheets. Her translations include works by Charles Baudelaire, Yves Bonnefoy, Hélène Cixous, and Francis Ponge.
REVIEWS
Praise for the Original French edition of Rêvoir:
‘Hélène Cixous is an expert in incontestable neologisms, which seem to have always existed, which she extracts from her heart and her intelligence, because, with her, the two always go hand in hand, in triple gallop. This alchemy is even the secret of his writing, so free, so persevering, revealing its intimate reverberations of lively acuity. The reading experience is disconcerting, in the sense that it leads you down another road, forces you to trust, opens you up to the landscape of rare sentences.’—Télérama
Praise for the Original French edition of Rêvoir:
‘A dazzling journey, a book of astonishing beauty, inventiveness and genius, Rêvoir gives us the lifeblood of endurance and grace.’—Diacritik
Praise for the English-language edition of Well-Kept Ruins:
‘Well-Kept Ruins is shaped by a yearning to recover the irrecuperable. Cixous is compelled to revisit the fates of these castaways. She is a daughter who attempts to commemorate a midwife; a writer who finds herself through the bond of mother and child.’—The Spectator
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Fall
Scream
Passover
Aboard the Endurance
The House was a Book
Kafka at the Swimming Pool
Memory is a Cat