Dear readers,
Today we remember the life of Italian artist Pippa Bacca, whose final work inspired Nathalie Léger’s La robe blanche, published as The White Dress, in Natasha Lehrer’s fine translation from the French.
Bacca was 33 when she disappeared, at the end of March 2008, in the south of Istanbul. She was taking part in ‘Brides on Tour’, a worldwide performance for peace in countries experiencing conflict and war; hitch-hiking from Milan to Jerusalem, dressed in a white wedding dress to symbolise ‘marriage between different peoples and nations’.
136 pages, paperback, 180 x 120 mm, isbn 978-9993318-8-7
eBook: 978-19993318-6-3
More details here.
Please do support your local indie bookshop in these difficult times, and see if they have a copy in stock (and if they don't, we do!)
‘Nathalie Léger seeks women’s private truths under their symbolic dresses. In this fascinating account, she holds together the sacred and the profane. Dizzying.’
– ELLE France
In this incandescent narrative where fascination and incomprehension are intertwined, Nathalie Léger surveys the terrain of performance art and describes her difficulty in circumscribing her subject, while also exposing a conflictual relationship with her elderly mother. But if a white dress cannot redeem the suffering of mankind, how can words do justice to a mother’s tears?
Still from La mariée, dir. Joel Curtz, 2013
‘The White Dress shows Léger doing something new. Her melodious intertwining of another’s story with her own recalls her other works, but this is an altogether darker, altogether more unashamedly melancholic exploration of narrative. For Léger, to immerse oneself in other people’s stories, whether out of pity or simple escapism, is only to find a projection of one’s own life.’ –The Arts Desk
A short experimental novel, The White Dress won France’s booksellers’ prize the Prix Wepler 2018, and closes a trilogy begun twelve years ago with L’Exposition, which we published last December as Exposition, in Amanda DeMarco’s translation. The second part of this trilogy, Suite for Barbara Loden, a central inspiration for our list, inaugurated the birth of Les Fugitives. This was March 2015. Les Fugitives is five! Looks like we missed our window for having a party.
We take this opportunity to give thanks to those of you who have enabled us to prosper (in relative terms!) – not just survive – and to carve our own creative space in the far-ranging world of English letters.
You can read an exclusive excerpt of The White Dress on Granta here.
Nathalie Léger is an award-winning French writer and the director of the Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine. Natasha Lehrer is a journalist, literary critic and translator. Both live in Paris.
This book is supported by the Institut français Paris as part as their programme of aid to publication and by the Institut français Royaume-Uni, as part of the Burgess programme
