Jean Frémon

Translated by Cole Swensen

Listed in the Financial Times’ Best Translated Fiction 2018

Progressing by image and word associations, Jean Frémon evokes Louise Bourgeois's history and inner life, bringing a sense of fascinating and moving proximity to the internationally renowned artist: the art world's grande dame and its shameless old lady, who spun personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks out with her characteristic insolence and wit, and comes to vibrant life again through the words of a most discrete, masterful writer.
From her childhood in France to her exile and life in America, to her death; her relationships to her family and her young assistant, her views on landmark male artists, the genesis of her own work... through the moods, barbs, resentments, reservations and back, at full speed - this is a phosphorescent account of Bourgeois's life, as could only be captured by the imagination of one artist regarding another.

Read excerpts in Granta, Harper’s (US), The Offing, and Partisan Hotel

See also Jean Frémon’s piece ‘Louise Bourgeois as I Knew Her’ in Notes on Craft for Granta

‘A truly wonderful book... The spider woman, the intellectuel, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the good girl sing together in this exuberant, lithe text, beautifully translated by Cole Swensen.’ — Siri Hustvedt

‘Jean Frémon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet.’ — Paul Auster

‘Now, Now Louison draws the reader in with all of the monstrous elegance of a spider, capturing us in the fine web of the creative process, and revealing, with biting wit and lyrical style, the ego, and sacrifices it takes to make monumental work.’ — Preti Taneja

By the same author: Nativity (2020) and Portrait Tales (2023)

Published 24 September 2018
128 pages, paperback original with French flaps
180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-0-9930093-8-9