Dear readers,
At a mere 70 pages, our second offering this month and penultimate title this year is packed full of moving moments and anecdotal treasures from the life of the author, who was 30 when her story was published in France to critical acclaim. (What a long sentence! But as the French say 'Quand on aime, on ne compte pas [les mots]').
On the 50th anniversary of the very first Creative Writing Course in the UK, at UEA, we bring you a new book that takes an old-school approach to authorship!
Julia Kerninon, one of France’s most acclaimed young novelists, also flies in the face of Hemingway's famous pronouncement that ‘the best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood.’ A Respectable Occupation tells an altogether different story, a poetic account of her pursuit.
Her nano-autobiography begins at five and a half years of age when, dressed as a leopard... she made the decision to become an author.
From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside café on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a fluid, feminine answer to A Moveable Feast.
Peppered with fine portraits of her disjointed yet loving family, the journey through her formative years entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, resulting in a vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a ‘respectable occupation’).
(Photograph courtesy of the author.)
‘The greatest writers are also the greatest readers. Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Jeanette Winterson – they all read, as Woolf put it, “to refresh and exercise [their] own creative powers.” They can’t stop themselves from writing about reading. They have origin stories of how reading and writing became as necessary as breathing. Julia Kerninon’s A Respectable Occupation joins the shelf of these biblioautobiographies; books on how writers crave books, how books beget books, how tricky it is to move from the position of the reader to that of the writer, and stand there feeling you’ve earned the right to call yourself, finally, a writer.’
– Lauren Elkin –
from her foreword to A Respectable Occupation
'Instead of giving us a formative reading list, we are presented with her relationship with books: how to build a life around the daily consummation and production of words, and the visceral satisfaction that this provides. Life-time events are presented in terms of how they provide opportunities for writing (...) The work of writing is taken seriously – as work, as something which requires time and money, and for which sacred duty sacrifices must be made.'
Jennifer Sarha, #RivetingReviews
‘Julia Kerninon lays down sentences as definitive as dictums, impresses with her maturity of style and command of narrative. The reader plunges in, with the same voraciousness she puts into her writing.’
ELLE (France)
‘Marvellously contagious’
Le Point
‘A Respectable Occupation is at once breathless and poised, as if what we are being told was absolutely urgent, but choosing the right words to do so was primordial. Julia Kerninon sweeps us along from one place to another, upending temporality with a precision and delicacy that carry us away.’
Le Devoir
Photograph by Renaud Monfourny
Julia Kerninon was born in 1987 and holds a Ph.D in American Literature. She has been compared to French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer for her sense of style and feeling for dialogue, and to Alain Resnais for the artful structure of her narratives. But, most of all, her work stands out for its contagious joy, drive, exuberance. Her first novel, Buvard, has won the Prix Françoise Sagan, among many other awards. Kerninon’s second novel, Le dernier amour d’Attila Kiss, won the Prix de la Closerie des Lilas in 2016, and her latest novel, My Devotion, winner of the 2018 Fénéon Literary Prize, is published by Europa Editions on 20 August 2020. She lives in Nantes.
Click here for a video reading of A Respectable Occupation, by the book's translator Ruth Diver. You can also read an excerpt of Lauren Elkin's foreword, and the first pages here, and watch an interview of Julia here.
A Respectable Occupation is translated by Ruth Diver
74 pages, paperback, 170 x 135 mm, isbn 978-1-9993318-1-8
e-book isbn 978-1-8380141-2-4
To celebrate the release of A Respectable Occupation we have redesigned our book bundles and launched The Anti-Muse. Turn tired assumptions of male genius and female muse on their head with these stories of wayward women.
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)!
Les Fugitives gratefully acknowledges financial assistance from
the following organisations:
