‘Highly stylised, highly self-reflexive, highly Woolfian.’ — The Arts Desk

‘I’ve just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, translated by Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by Amanda Demarco. All three defy categorisation – history, essay, memoir, fiction. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works very much.’ — Catherine Lacey, iNews

‘Léger’s writing is concerned with the value of its own creation, of its possibility to respond to what she terms elsewhere the ‘annihilation’ of narrative through male violence. This writing is made through doubt about its own capacities, and its own efficacies. But I think there is a benefit to faltering at the possibilities of expression.' — Katie Da Cunha Lewin, The White Review

‘Exposition is partly a book about ideas of beauty, then, and partly about photography. It pays homage to classics of the genre such as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, without particularly seeking to insert itself into that genealogy. Léger turns away from Castiglione to write about photography, turns away from photography to write about writing, turns away from writing to write about herself – and her mother. This aversion to straightforward narrative is played out through Léger’s loyalty to the fragment as form. She constructs her books from island-paragraphs that float unmoored on the white space of the page, with little attempt to make meaning or argument flow between them. You have to hop from one to the next. Which is not to say that there is no order to what is presented; the links are there to be made by the reader. What narrative flow there is works slowly, and at depth.’ — Jonathan Gibbs

US and Australian reviews:

‘Insisting on looking for what isn’t there is part of Léger’s method. As she searches for truths about her subjects’ lives, she amends the archive’s gaps by introducing short flights of speculation and imagination, allowing her subjects to swell into living figures. Her writing is intellectual, self-aware, and lucid in its demonstration of this investigation-in-progress, a thinking-through dramatized on the page […] This is the brilliance of Léger’s project: we can look and look and see nothing of a person; we can examine them minutely, intently, and miss them completely.’ — New York Review of Books

‘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

‘Léger’s triptych of books about three historical women (an aristocrat central to the development of photography; a filmmaker; and a performance artist) occupies the liminal space between the stylised and the real (…) [F]or Léger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Léger’s extraordinary short books.’ — David McCooey, Sydney Review of Books

‘These Léger books are lush, obsessive, and self-reflective (…) Nathalie Léger's transcendent triptych of books about fallen-off-the-path female artists (...) deftly observes how we are all often absorbed into the wave of our own familial and inherited traumas, and how we might resist them.’ — Nathan Scott McNamara, Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Part-biography, part-autofiction, part-essayistic collage, Exposition is resistant to categorisation […] As a true original, it is deserving of attention.’ — BUZZ

‘With no plot or linear chronology, the strands still cohere miraculously, held together by the intensity of Léger’s engagement with Oldoïni. Léger’s vigorous work consistently satisfies, with ideas crystallizing with the clarity of a photograph.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘A brand new title from St. Louis' own Dorothy Project, Exposition explores the life of the Countess of Castiglione, a 19th-century noblewoman who decides to become the most photographed woman in the world. Leger presents this story of womanhood, vanity, and the passage of time in prose that is taut, luminous, and genre-defying. An absolutely gorgeous little book.’ — Griffin Reed, bookseller; Subterranean Books, Buzzfeed

‘She takes each subject on her own terms. What separates her gaze from someone like Barthes or Sontag is that it is steady. Léger does not look away. What matters is the subject, not Léger’s theory of the subject — in fact it is any theory of the subject that Léger is trying to abandon, to get to the woman herself. She’s not impartial: she yearns for her subjects. She subjects herself to them.’ — Kyle Williams, Full Stop

‘With ferocity and pathos, Léger enters into a standing-with relationship with these other women only to realize she’s been in touch with herself the entire time. This feels to me like the natural movement of the most revelatory art criticism—to move close to the work, to ride along then pierce the work’s textured surface into its mysterious netherworld then looping back out (through innards) towards these words you hear out there in the private distance only to find them coming from your own mouth. With all of these women—Countess of Castiglione, Barbara Loden and Wanda (and Alma H Malone), and Pippa Bacca—Léger comes to know them as women who lived rich lives, artists’ lives, intensely felt.’ —Jay Ponteri, Essay Daily

‘The suffocating interpolations of being a woman have concealed the words of so many: Pippa Bacca, whose seemingly naive project is now bound to her rape and murder; American actor and director Barbara Loden, whose project of semi-autobiographical film Wanda details the listlessness of life for the 1970s American housewife; The Countess of Castiglione, whose hope had been to exhibit her photos at the upcoming 1900 International Exposition; and Léger’s own mother, whose words ‘too have been hidden away.’ The triptych not only unearths the lost narratives of noted women; but more significantly the writers’ reckoning with her own mother—’I never helped her, I never stood up for her’—suggests that the triptych’s aim is to give voice to one woman: her mother.’ —Clancey D’Isa, Chicago Review of Books

French reviews:

‘Highbrow but highly readable; delving deep yet luminous (…) Through artistic evocation, stream of consciousness, historical detail and personal memory, the author guides us into a world where images become masks of the real.’ — ELLE (France)

‘A subtle novel that explores femininity and its magic spells. Bewitching.’ — Vogue Paris

‘Tightly controlled and clear-sighted […] ‘a superb study.’ — La Croix

‘In Nathalie Léger’s magnificent text, everything is turned on its head, everything is paradox […] L’Exposition is the fragile and dangerous attempt to reconstitute the self, to seek, in the secret of another woman – in the insane dramatisation of her silence – the very thing that eludes us within ourselves. Thus it is the blanks between the fragments that give Exposition its beauty and its truthfulness.’ — Les Inrockuptibles

‘Nathalie Léger brings Castiglione back to life with grace, style and taste’—Cultures Livres

Further praise for Nathalie Léger and Suite for Barbara Loden

‘Brilliant little book’ — Valeria Luiselli (via Twitter)

‘Inventive and affecting, Suite for Barbara Loden takes both the novel and biography to new and interesting places.’ – Eimear McBride, The Guardian’s best books of the year 2016

‘Léger jump-cuts through time and space with the expertise of a movie director’ — Joanna Walsh

‘A little gem’ — Harper’s Magazine

‘Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything...’ — The New Yorker

‘A moving, subtle novel about the need to create’ — Le Monde

‘Since closing our Winter issue last week, I’ve taken up the rest of the book, and I’ve found it to be one of the most affecting stories I’ve read in a long time. A mix of observation, recitation, and imagination, Suite persists in the idea that no single perspective is sufficient in gaining an understanding of a person, and also, perhaps, that no accumulation of perspectives is sufficient either. — Staff Picks, The Paris Review

Further praise for Nathalie Léger and The White Dress

‘Throughout, Léger offers striking observations on how making art distills experience, while references to the polar approaches of Leo Tolstoy and Svetlana Alexeivich—adorned descriptions vs. unalloyed reporting—inform Léger’s own method. Readers should not miss this smart, skillful reckoning with acts of selflessness, betrayal, and grief.’ — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

‘Léger not only immerses herself in the quest, but in doing so creates a symphony of Pippa’s story and her own life, examining the symbolism of the white dress, and the fate to which the actions of others (usually men) condemn women.’ — Translating Women

‘Nathalie Léger is a melancholy sentinel. From book to book she writes with a hunter’s instinct, questioning the motives of women who, through their oeuvre, transform their lives into a mystery. Each explores alienation and the female condition. In this fascinating account, she holds together the sacred and the profane.’ – ELLE (France)

UK reviews:

White Review’s Books of the Year 2019
Let’s try again. Start over.On Nathalie Léger., Katie Da Cunha Lewin, The White Review, September 2020
Catherine Lacey: ‘Who is my hero from outside literature? No one is outside literature!’, iNews, 27 June 2020
Review: Nathalie Léger, Exposition and The White Dress, Translating Women, 11 May 2020
Out of photographs into words: Nathalie Léger’s Exposition, Barthes and the mother-child photograph, Jonathan Gibbs, Tiny Camels, 25 February 2020
Nathalie Léger: Exposition review – mysteries, rumours and facts, Charlie Stone, The Arts Desk, 12 January 2020
(Not) Books of the Year 2019, Jonathan Gibbs, Tiny Camels, 31 December 2019

US reviews:

The Fourth Woman, Nicole Rudick, New York Review of Books, 19 August 2021
Nathalie Léger’s Hall of Mirrors, Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 22 April 2021
Briefly Noted Book Reviews, The New Yorker, 7 December 2020
The Humiliation of No Longer Being Desired: Nathalie Léger’s Investigations of Abandonment, Nathan Scott McNamara, Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 December 2020
One thing or a mother, Leslie Jamison, Bookforum, December 2020
Women Resurrected in Léger’s Triptych, Clancey D’Isa, Chicago Review of Books, 15 September 2020
Making an Echo: the essay writer as receiver and transmitter in the works of Nathalie Léger, Jay Ponteri, Essay Daily, 14 September 2020
Exposition/The White Dress - Nathalie Léger, Kyle Williams, Full Stop, 14 September 2020
38 Great books to read this fall, recommended by our favourite indie booksellers, Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed, 14 September 2020
Exposition, Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2020

Other reviews:

The Irreparable, the Inconsolable, David McCooey, Sydney Review of Books, 14 December 2020
Latest, Thomas Koed, Volume Books, 4 January 2020