UK reviews:
‘A book I happily followed into all the corners it took me to’ — Samir Chadha, The White Review’s Books of the Year 2021.
‘This book is autobiography, it’s biography, it’s about gender, it’s film writing, it’s writing about place…It’s an incredibly rich work and, (…), highly recommended.’ — Richard Barrett, Manchester Review of Books
‘Inventive and affecting, Suite for Barbara Loden takes both the novel and biography to new and interesting places.’ — Eimear McBride, The Guardian
‘Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden […] is part ode to Wanda, part biography, part essay, part autofiction, and entirely honest. It led me to watch the film and the film led me to read the book again and the book led me to watch the film again and it’s been going on like that for some time now.’ — Catherine Lacey, The Guardian
‘Beautifully translated’— Times Literary Supplement
‘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.' —The White Review
‘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
‘In hugely reductive terms, this is Geoff Dyer’s Zona meets Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick: an open and intelligent piece of art criticism drifts into broader critique of social and cultural issues, and is honest about the fact that it can’t do any of these without also being autobiographical. That it is published in a beautiful edition that gives a boutique twist on the classic French livre de poche style, by a brand new British publisher proudly asserting their ownership of an important but overlooked niche, only adds to the charm. Book of the year.’ — Jonathan Gibbs
US reviews:
‘Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything—biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front. . . . In her combination of the conversational and the incantatory, the fragmentary and the infinite, Léger captures something of [Marguerite] Duras’s own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of Wanda are entirely her own.’ — The New Yorker
‘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
‘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
‘Suite for Barbara Loden...has all the ingenuity of the mechanism inside a camera that allows a mirror to fold away so that light may pass through a focussed lens.’ — Eula Biss, The New Yorker
‘A powerful example of how summary, channeled through the most personal of perspectives, can be a form of art.’ — Harper's Magazine
‘There’s a kind of inert vividness to these descriptions, a scrim between me and the dramatic moment, that I find almost erotic. Léger intersperses descriptions of Wanda with passages about how she came to know this movie, how she tried and tried to understand Barbara Loden herself. Woven into these, too, are autobiographical asides. One begins: “Once upon a time the man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men.” The result of these combined fragments is delicious and mysterious.' — Edan Lepucki, The Millions, A Year in Reading 2016
‘A truly remarkable book. I love Leger's obsessive circling, the connections she draws in and through the Loden/Wanda narrative, some deeply haunting images ...’ — Anna Zalakostas (Green Apple Books, San Francisco)
‘Suite for Barbara Loden isn’t just the story of Barbara Loden: it’s the story of Nathalie Léger, and to a certain extent, the story of women everywhere. How better to preserve oneself than to be the author of one’s own vulnerability?’ — Bloom
“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:
‘This beautiful book is striking for its echoes of artists who are either quoted or (never gratuitously) emulated, including Godard, Fred Wiseman, Sebald and Perec.’ — La Quinzaine littéraire
‘One of my favorite pieces, a multigenre portrait of Léger, Loden, and Wanda (the titular subject of Loden’s 1970 film, which Loden wrote and directed and in which she stars). Léger sets out to write a short notice of Loden for an encyclopedia but quickly becomes mired in the task. How do you describe a person you don’t know? What constitutes their essentialness? And how do you tell their story simply? 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.’ — The Paris Review
Further praise for Nathalie Léger and Exposition
‘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
‘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
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:
Top 10 badly behaved biographies, Catherine Lacey, The Guardian, 12 April 2023
The White Review’s Books of the Year 2021 - listed by Samir Chadha and Lauren Elkin. The White Review, December 2021
Top 10 unconventional essays, Eula Biss, The Guardian, 13 January 2021
2020 End of Years No.4, Richard Barrett, Manchester Review of Books, 13 December 2020
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
Backlisted, Angus Wilson - Hemlock and After, John Mitchinson and Andy Miller with Dickon Edwards, 4 February 2019
Top 10 books about wild women, The Guardian, 11 January 2017
Cinema on the page: Suite for Barbara Loden, online exclusive by Jonathan Gibbs, The White Review, May 2016
‘It takes both the novel and the biography to new and interesting places’, Eimear McBride, Guardian Books of the Year, 28 November 2015
Jonathan Gibbs’ Book of the Year, Tiny Camels, 8 December 2015
Review 31′s Best Novels of 2015, Dominic Jaeckle, Review 31, December 2015
Recently Read: Nathalie Léger & Roger Grenier, Terry Pitts, Vertigo, 9 June 2015
Wanda: Book of the Film, Anna Goodall, Original Cine, 31 March 2015
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
The Slow Bloom of Suite for Barbara Loden, Maddie King, The Millions, 19 April 2019
Booze, pathos, and passivity in Suite for Barbara Loden, Brandon Soderberg, City Paper, Baltimore, USA, 25 January 2017
Staff Picks: Léger, Loving, LSD, The Paris Review, 11 November 2016
Barbara Loden: A Woman Telling Her Own Story Through That of Another Woman, Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 1 November 2016
Suite for Barbara Loden, Publishers Weekly, 1 August 2016
New Books, Christine Smallwood, Harper's Magazine, October 2016
Suite for Barbara Loden, Amanda de Marco, The Rumpus, 2 June 2015
A Miniature Model of Modernity: Suite for Barbara Loden, Jenny McPhee, Bookslut, April 2015
Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, K. Thomas Kahn, Music & Literature, 10 March 2015
Other reviews:
The Irreparable, the Inconsolable, David McCooey, Sydney Review of Books, 14 December 2020