Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Trysting
WORK NOTES: trans by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/15/1969
WEBSITE:
CITY: Ardeche
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: French
http://www.andotherstories.org/book/trysting/ * http://www.andotherstories.org/author/emmanuelle-pagano/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 15, 1969, in Rodez, France.
EDUCATION:Studied fine art and the aesthetics of cinema.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist.
AWARDS:European Union Prize for Literature, for her novel Les Adolescents troglodytes.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
French novelist Emmanuelle Pagano has published numerous works with prestigious French publisher P.O.L., and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She also collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. She received the European Union Prize for Literature, for her novel Les Adolescents troglodytes. Pagano was born in 1969 in the Aveyron region of southern France and now lives in Ardéche.
In 2016, Pagano published Trysting, translated by UK editors Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Pagano addresses love in nearly three hundred vignettes of romance and relationships in micro-stories, some a line long, some a page or two. They present first dates, first passions, gender and sexuality, infidelities, secret moments, and bitter betrayals. Her stories also feature attraction, aphrodisiacs, amnesia, fantasies, anecdotes, and adventures. The stories deal with predominantly heterosexual relationships and many characters have no names, yet they feel pain, hopelessness, truth, sweetness, intimacy, and humor. A writer in Kirkus Reviews commented: “Pagano delights and surprises with uncanny observations, each sounding a small point of emotional truth, like a well-aimed pebble pinging off a windowpane.”
Although the book has no main protagonist or plot, it does present a mosaic of love’s beginnings and endings, through which “Pagano has created a beautiful treasury of amorous moments,” noted Emily Rhodes in London Guardian Online. Lauren Goldenberg on the Music & Literature website said: “To read through the slim volume, is to find all your own memories of different relationships coming to mind—ones that you’ve experienced, ones that you’ve witnessed, ones that you could imagine coming to pass. This resonance speaks to how universal many of the trysts actually are.”
On the Irish Times Online, Sarah Gilmartin praised the book, saying: “From love and desire, to loss and rejection, Pagano mines her lovers’ lives for nuggets, delivering for the most part compact scenes that offer moments of recognition. Objects, gestures, smells, emotions—Trysting is a mosaic of the myriad things that define a relationship.” Acknowledging the unique presentation of the stories, Michael B. Tager noted on the Collagist website: “Those coming in with expectations of a story are going to be disappointed. However, what is found within Trysting is no less affecting for its non-linear structure. Although Pagano isn’t telling a story, she is telling a theme, telling a tone, telling a part of life that resists too-particular expression.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Trysting.
ONLINE
Collagist, http://thecollagist.com (October 1, 2016), review of Trysting.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 11, 2016), Emily Rhodes, review of Trysting.
Irish Times Online, http://www.irishtimes.com/ (December 17, 2016), Sarah Gilmartin, review of Trysting.
Music & Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org/ (November 16, 2016), Lauren Goldenberg, review of Trysting.*
Emmanuelle Pagano
Emmanuelle Pagano_head_credit Michel Roty
Born in 1969 in the Aveyron region of southern France, Emmanuelle Pagano studied fine art and the aesthetics of cinema. She now lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, and in France is primarily published by P.O.L. She has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music.
Trysting
Grains of sand, bridges, shampoo, a bike, board games, yoga, sellotape, birds, balloons, tattoos, wandering hands, tweezers, maths, fish, letterboxes, puppets, a vacuum cleaner, a ball of string – and love.
In this novel of yous and mes, of hims and hers, Pagano choreographs the objects, gestures, places, and persons through which love is made real.
More Information
If you had subscribed to And Other Stories before this book went to the printers, you would have received the first edition of the book – in which all subscribers are thanked by name – before its official publication, as well us up to 5 other And Other Stories titles per year. Find out about subscribing to upcoming titles here.
Advance Praise for Trysting
‘Trysting is a mirror shattered in play: inscribed on each bright shard of glass, a fable about a fragment of love.’ Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo
‘Polyphonic, arboreal, rhizomatic, desperate, stunning.’ Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse
‘The interactions of men and women, infinitely varied and minutely scrutinised, are Emmanuelle Pagano’s central concern here. No oddity or anomaly of behaviour is too slight to escape her notice, but the effect is less forensic than boundlessly compassionate and wise. She is a prose poet worthy to stand with the great exponents of the genre.’ Christopher Reid, author of A Scattering
‘A bold, experimental book of cohering fragments, full of intimately-spoken truths about desire, about love, and about their aftermaths. It is like having strangers whisper their secrets into our minds.’ Patrick McGuinness, author of The Last Hundred Days
‘Subtle and moving, the fragments of life presented in Trysting question the relationships between love, sex and gender, making the everyday strange and the strange everyday’ Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir
‘Trysting is an album of destinies. They each have their décor. They talk of first frosts, of the wood that must be brought in, of the huge rubbish tips of life, of the disorder of houses. Of beds that are no longer made because they are too often occupied. Of the warmth of being at home and of finding oneself. This essential truth of what we are. Emmanuelle Pagano sends every reader back to familiar territory. Her book is full of discreet and recognisable emotion.’ Xavier Houssin, Le Monde
‘Understated and devilishly talented, Pagano follows her amorous quest, made up of stand-out sketches, scathing little stories, confessions and analyses, all shared between voices.’ Thierry Clermont, Le Figaro
‘Trysting reveals what only literature can: the basic irrationality, the arbitrary enchantment, but also the residual grace within the feeling of love. A multitude of anonymous male and female characters show us the ways we are seduced by each other: a scent, a movement, a way of being, a way of making love.’
Alexandre Gefen, Magazine littéraire
‘Though she insists on brevity, Pagano never abandons complexity and holds fast to the animal sensuality that forms the bedrock of every couple’s relationship.’
Clementine Goldszal, Les Inrockuptibles
‘Familiar but never banal. Without a trace of performance, full of shared confidences, it has an incredible delicacy.’
Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle
Emmanuelle Pagano
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emmanuelle Pagano (born 1969) is a French writer. She was born in Rodez (Aveyron) and studied fine arts at university. She has written a number of books, including six novels as of 2013. She won the EU Prize for Literature for her novel Les Adolescents troglodytes.[1]
Pagano lives in Ardèche with her family.
Awards
Prix TSR du roman 2005 for Le Tiroir à cheveux.
Prix Wepler 2008 for Les Mains gamines.
Prix Rhône-Alpes du Livre 2009 for Les Mains gamines.
Prix Rhône-Alpes de l’adaptation cinématographique 2009 for Les Adolescents troglodytes.
Prix de Littérature de l’Union européenne 2009 for Les Adolescents troglodytes.
Works
Pour être chez moi, sous le pseudonyme d'Emma Schaak, récit, éditions du Rouergue, 2002.
Pas devant les gens, roman, La Martinière, 2004.
Le Tiroir à cheveux, P.O.L., roman, 2005.
Les Adolescents troglodytes, roman, P.O.L., 2007.
Les Mains gamines, roman, P.O.L., 2008.
Le Guide automatique, nouvelle, Librairie Olympique, 2008.
Toucher terre, à propos de Jacques Dupin, Publie.net, 2008.
L'Absence d'oiseaux d'eau, roman, P.O.L., 2010.
La Décommande, nouvelle, JRP-Ringier, coll. « Hapax Series », 2011.
Un renard à mains nues, recueil de nouvelles, P.O.L., 2012.
Le Travail de mourir, nouvelle, photographies de Claude Rouyer, éd. Les Inaperçus, 2013.
Nouons-nous, roman, P.O.L., 2013.
Emmanuelle Pagano, Jennifer Higgins, Sophie Lewis: TRYSTING
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Emmanuelle Pagano, Jennifer Higgins, Sophie Lewis TRYSTING Two Lines Press (Adult Fiction) 9.95 11, 15 ISBN: 978-1-931883-56-6
A series of tender little love bites, running the length and depth of all connotations and permutations that the word “love” contains. Pagano’s English-translation debut collects, in a torrent of brief vignettes, many lifetimes' worth of heartbreaks, secret moments, reminiscences, betrayals, fantasies, voyeurisms, and disappointments, all deftly translated in Higgins and Lewis' full and limber prose. Following in the epigrammatic path laid by Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines, this book is hardly less varied for casting its gaze on a single, messy corner of our experiential universe. In this way, it conjures the spirit of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, dealing in life’s ardent undertows, which, in some form or degree, are nearly as inescapable a part of the human experience as the ends that befell the residents of Masters’ “The Hill.” Pagano delights and surprises with uncanny observations, each sounding a small point of emotional truth, like a well-aimed pebble pinging off a windowpane. Take for example, these complete entries: “She was only with me to have somewhere to write to, an addressee,” and “Life with him is so easy and sweet and joyful. I have a feeling he’s cheating.” You may find yourself laughing out loud in recognition or looking up and around an empty room, wondering if any number of these compact scenes had somehow been lifted straight from your own private journal—or the hidden folds of your memory. Delicate and poignant, the book abounds with the ups, downs, and stagnations of the subject of focus itself. Because of the imposed constraints of the form, the commitment to the episodic and angling toward aphorism, the book expends no energy on overall forward movement, and so some may find this collection better suited for intermittent rather than sustained reading. A sweet and bitter onslaught of love and desire, found and glimpsed, held and lost.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Emmanuelle Pagano, Jennifer Higgins, Sophie Lewis: TRYSTING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216117&it=r&asid=7865f54951ab9ad729c4b897ee52878e. Accessed 1 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216117
Trysting by Emmanuelle Pagano review – a treasury of amorous moments
Stretching from a few words to a page or so, these poetic vignettes capture love’s beginnings, endings and stopping points along the way
A couple kissing near the Eiffel Tower at sunset
An elaborate mosaic of love. Photograph: Alamy
Shares
98
Comments
0
Emily Rhodes
Friday 11 November 2016 16.30 GMT
Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 18.34 BST
In Trysting, translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis, Emmanuelle Pagano arranges poetic vignettes into an elaborate mosaic about love. Each shard, stretching from a few words to the length of a page or so, captures a penetrating moment. We are given love’s beginnings, endings and the many deeply personal stopping points on the journey. A man sees a high-heeled woman who has stumbled in the snow, “head held high … soaking wet all down the back of her coat”, and offers her his arm. Another tells how he packed his lover’s suitcase when she left him: “I wanted to. It was what I’d always done.” A woman reveals “our bedtime ritual ... for ten years now, every evening” she plucks the hairs from her husband’s back. Many passages are extremely sensuous, brimming with the touch, smell and taste of love – “I moistened her all over with saliva to get to know her off by heart.” The profusion of snippets, with no main protagonist or overarching plot, makes it a difficult book to read cover to cover; instead, Pagano has created a beautiful treasury of amorous moments.
• Trysting is published by And Other Stories. To order a copy for £7.37 (RRP 8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Trysting review: Snapshots of relationships’ myriad faces
Emmanuelle Pagano’s latest book brings readers on rollercoaster of love’s highs and lows
Emmanuelle Pagano: the tenderness of love comes through in stories
Emmanuelle Pagano: the tenderness of love comes through in stories
Sarah Gilmartin
Sat, Dec 17, 2016, 05:00
First published:
Sat, Dec 17, 2016, 05:00
Book Title:
Trysting
ISBN-13:
9781908276766
Author:
Emmanuelle Pagano
Publisher:
And Other Stories
Guideline Price:
£8.99
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Ernest Hemingway’s fabled micro-story, allegedly the result of a $10 bet over lunch that he could write a novel in six words, pares a tragedy to its bare bones. What the American author shows with his elliptical brilliance is that whole worlds and lives and futures, or lack thereof, can be condensed into a sentence.
The French writer Emmanuelle Pagano’s latest book Trysting sets out to do likewise on the topic of relationships. A series of vignettes charting moments of emotional truth, it brings the reader on a rollercoaster ride of the highs and lows of love. The micro-stories – sometimes a line, sometimes a page or two – read like prose poems, as unnamed individuals unite, prevail or part.
The stories are snapshots of predominantly heterosexual relationships, with variations including pieces about the longing and loneliness of a gay man, or the synchronised periods of female friendships. From love and desire, to loss and rejection, Pagano mines her lovers’ lives for nuggets, delivering for the most part compact scenes that offer moments of recognition. Objects, gestures, smells, emotions – Trysting is a mosaic of the myriad things that define a relationship.
Jennifer Johnston’s sophisticated, at times deceptively conversational, narratives have drawn on social class in a country caught between Catholic and Protestant cultures. Photograph: Alan BetsonJennifer Johnston is June’s Irish Times Book Club author
My writing prompts unleashed some extraordinary tales of ordinary life in Dublin’s inner city from the ’50s up until the current day. The inner lives of Dublin’s inner city: the art of building a community
Felicity Hayes-McCoy: I first visited the west Kerry Gaeltacht aged 17, sent there to study Irish and gripped by a love of folkloreMy fictional world, mapped on a napkin
Kit de Waal: “set out to create an individual and genuine voice in My Name Is Leon and has succeeded absolutely”. Photograph: Justine StoddartMy Name is Leon wins Irish Novel of the Year Award
Michael Longley: “Harold Pinter encouraged me in my youth. So, for personal as well as literary and political reasons I am moved and honoured by this award.” Photograph: Brenda FitzsimonsMichael Longley is awarded PEN Pinter Prize
Snippets
Many of the stories read like snippets from overheard conversations: “He wanted me to sign my name on the postcards he wrote to his friends, his family, even his beloved old mum.” A woman struggles to meld her life with her lover: “One night I shut myself in the storage unit and have a good, proper cry, screaming and howling as our city never lets us do.”
Some of the most impactful pieces are one-liners: “Each time I see him our bodies gently unlace their ligaments, unfasten their joints.” Happiness creates suspicion in another lover’s mind: “Life with him is so easy and sweet and joyful. I have a feeling he’s cheating.” Elsewhere, a rather chilling voice gives another perspective on love: “Desire for her made me stronger, a good deal stronger than her.”
As with the Twitter fiction of recent years, the form of the stories gives momentum to the collection. The eye is constantly drawn to the next piece, a hypnotic feeling of “just one more”. Pagano has a way with opening lines that drops us into her stories: “The police said it was probably a voluntary disappearance.”
Other pieces are less interesting – a woman commenting on her lover’s daytime breathing, another complaining about being woken up at night, a man forbidden from joining his wife in the garden – or merit more unpacking, such as the woman who leaves her cheapskate lover in his budget hotel. Where does she go, even for that one evening? It is the form rather than the stories themselves that gives the collection its energy. The episodic nature makes it a good choice for a Christmas stocking, easy to dip into after dinner as you try to drown out your own loved ones.
Some of the longer pieces, particularly on physical intimacy and loss of self, recall Joanna Walsh’s debut Vertigo earlier this year, with the strongest vignettes in Trysting reminiscent of the micro fiction of Lydia Davis. Pagano has published over a dozen works of fiction, which have been translated into German, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish. Her 2007 novel Les Adolescents troglodytes won the EU Prize for Literature. Trysting is her English language debut, deftly translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis.
Tenderness
The tenderness of love comes through in stories that show a man tucking his partner into bed after she’s fallen asleep studying, or another who spritzes his newspaper with water to stop the pages from rustling, or most affectingly, in tales that feature partners caring for each other in terminal illness.
While the highs of new love are profiled, rejection and pain are a more central focus. There’s the lover abandoned because she isn’t “up-to-date”, the ex-boyfriend who breaks into his former girlfriend’s house, the confirmed bachelor who used to be happy in his own company, but “since she left there’s only silence.”
The pain that occurs when love ends is a recurring theme. A woman cries so much that marks appear under her eyes, “two little purplish bulges where the blood vessels had burst”. Another story sees a woman move back into her family home near a level-crossing. There are echoes of Simon and Garfunkel as she burrows down: “I’m safe inside my house, my time marked out by the regular vibrations. The barrier keeps me safe.”
Just as we’re wondering why we bother to fall in love at all, Pagano reminds us through her thoughtful reflections that there’s always another glimmer on the horizon: “What do you call that feeling, just like nostalgia except about the future? The regret, the longing to rediscover something you haven’t yet lived through?” Or failing that, a chance of happiness with a friendly control freak: “He presented me with a diary in which my whole life is set out, because, he says, otherwise you’ll never be able to manage your life.” Tinder figures should soar.
Emmanuelle Pagano's
Trysting
November 16, 2016
by Lauren Goldenberg
Trysting by Emmanuelle Pagano tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis (And Other Stories & Two Lines Press, Oct. 2016) Reviewed by Lauren Goldenberg
Trysting
by Emmanuelle Pagano
tr. Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis
(And Other Stories & Two Lines Press, Oct. 2016)
Reviewed by Lauren Goldenberg
Language fails as a means to define love; the sentiment is too great, too felt to be held in words. The French author Emmanuelle Pagano’s first book to be translated into English, Trysting, manages to convey the emotion indirectly, definition via fiction. The simplicity of its English title belies the strangeness of the original French, Nouons-nous. Reviewing the various definitions for nouer and trysting, some current, some obsolete, some very specific (the final of six definitions for “tryst” in the Oxford English Dictionary is: An appointed gathering for buying and selling; a market or fair, esp. for cattle) it became clear that Pagano’s achievement is contained within the combined definitions of the two titles. To tryst means to meet at a designated place and time (surprisingly, the OED gives no mention of love or lover). Nouer is a bit more complicated, but en bref it means to tie up, to knot, and the reflexive form means to establish, engage, take shape, begin. Roughly, I read nouons-nous as something like knotting ourselves. Pagano’s book is a series of episodes, whether a brief glance or many years, that reveal the myriad ways love occurs. As two people are brought together, there’s a connection, a start, a moment’s knot. Some of the passages underscore one particular aspect of a relationship and are only as brief as a sentence, while others, running a couple of pages, bring together a wider array of themes. There are no names, often no genders, no ages. Just two people, crossing paths.
Above all the book bears the stamp of emotional truth; there exists no single way to capture or experience love or its loss. There is sweetness, intimacy, humor, pain, loss, suffering, violence, ephemeral unique things that only occur because two particular people intersect at a specific moment in time. The moment of love is a tryst, the formation of a knot.
To read through the slim volume, is to find all your own memories of different relationships coming to mind—ones that you’ve experienced, ones that you’ve witnessed, ones that you could imagine coming to pass. This resonance speaks to how universal many of the trysts actually are; a fair number, for example, center around sharing a bed. Even as the feelings Pagano’s characters experience in this space—intimacy, thrill, boredom, tedium, violence—verge on the particular, they are familiar; to be awake while your bedfellow sleeps unaware of you is so common as to be almost mundane. “I watch him sleeping and feel very far away during these long nights of insomnia. I gaze at him, so calm, wrapped up in the bedding. I’m completely alone next to this sleeping man.” The bed is the closest space to share with a partner, yet even here loneliness exists, and insensitivities can speak magnitudes. “I can’t stand it anymore, this being dragged awake at night that he puts me through, when I’ve fallen into a deep sleep and he comes to bed after me, loud and lumbering, not bothering to check if I’m already asleep.” In the multiplicity of these scenes, Trysting seems to insist love is created, made, and lost in bed.
The bedtime passages demonstrate in part one of the central themes running through the book—those things that we feel and notice about our partner but refuse to say out loud, those sentiments that Pagano shares only with the reader and that we share with no one at all in our own lives. “With him I always felt pleasure without showing it. I wouldn’t fake it—on the contrary—I’d hide my orgasms from him.” Another episode fixates on the dishonesties in a relationship, raising that question of how well we can ever know the person we are with: “So I lie to her. I need her in order to become the man I must become, but I’m not sure I love her . . . I would like her to teach me not to lie anymore, but if I stop lying, I’ll no longer be able to tell her I love her.” Even when an occasional one-liner reads as a platitude that can almost go without saying because so many people have had this same thought, its underlying truth shows precisely why Pagano included it. “No one sees what I see when I look at her.” Not even you, reader.
There is the way love appears to the outside world, the way that same love exists for the beloved, and the way that love exists only within the lover’s thoughts. As it appears to the outside world, there is a passage towards the end of the book that is abrupt and pointed, “I wonder if, when they hear the banging that seems to be coming from our apartment, our neighbors think he’s doing some renovations, even late at night, or if they hear me too, whimpering and begging him to stop.” Pagano at once brings us into this darkest part of the intimacy in this couple and at the same time shines a light on the rest of the world, and the reader wonders along with the narrator, do the neighbors really think nothing is wrong or is this a willful blind eye? Another take on love in the public’s eye that comes a little later:
He isn’t very relaxed in groups, and at the slightest hint of emotion, he stutters. He stutters saying my name, and I love it. I think he’s noticed, so he does it a lot, calls out to me, says my name. When we’re alone he never stutters, but as soon as we’re out in public, having a drink with friends, he turns to me on the slightest pretext, multiplying my name in his mouth.
Other passages encompass an entire life and touch on several themes, several truths. A few I read without thinking twice, some made me chuckle with their frank humor and others shocked me in their uncanny similarity to my own experience. I laughed out loud at a particular few that brought back immediate memories and feelings of adolescent angst (the fraught nerves of speaking to your crush on the phone!). At the same time, Pagano’s sections on age and aging, at once connected to and distinct from the theme of time’s passage, are subtly moving. One of the stories that struck me the most is the following:
In the beginning, as a timid newcomer, I allowed myself to fall into the arms he held out to me. I had only moved into the retirement home under pressure from my children. I felt lost and betrayed. He was there, he comforted me, he offered me the solace of a love story at an age when I thought I had forgotten everything about love. When I found my bearings, he left. I’d forgotten nothing about love; it hurts as much as ever. He moved on to a resident who is starting to show signs of dementia and has trouble remembering things. One of the nurses told me to stop crying. She said it wasn’t worth it. She has known him for years, and he only latches on to women who are disoriented. He wants them to need him. When they recover a bit, like you, he leaves them. It shows you’re doing better.
The narrator’s age has not changed her feelings: “I’d forgotten nothing about love; it hurts as much as ever.” Age collapses love here—at first it might be joyful, but the familiarity is that of pain. I also noted that the language of the elderly narrator’s conversation with the nurse is resonant of many I’ve had with friends in our twenties and thirties. Is the truism of plus ça change one to fear or to accept?
This passage is a cousin to one about a person in an intensive care unit after some kind of accident. The nurse here ignores all requests to call the patient’s wife and instead takes the patient’s hand: “The young woman’s hand wasn’t helping me or calming me down . . . The hand held mine without hurting me and without comforting me.” The whole passage runs maybe half a page, and we are in a confused fog, the patient’s own pain causing us ever more worry, until its final lines hit: “And suddenly that hand drew away and was replaced by a different one. This hand was rough and wrinkled. I squeezed it hard. It was old, twisted by years of work, by life, all this life of ours.” The passage is recast; we are relieved from what we’ve just read, allowed to see the power in a gesture, the restorative strength offered by the love of a life that has been fully lived together.
Many passages highlight sweetness, joy, and the other positive facets of love. But a thread of loss, heartbreak and difficult recovery runs through. And while Trysting may be about how to love, Pagano is also examining how to live. Life lived tied to other people, life lived when that comes undone. One speaker’s life comes apart when his girlfriend leaves him: “My basic functions were abandoning me, just as she had; I didn’t have the strength to cry, or even enough water in me for tears. When tears, hunger, thirst, and digestion returned, I realized that I was alive and that living, filling my belly, getting things moving, getting dirty, would help me forget her.” It seems obvious but the experience of love’s arrival and departure is quite literally lived through, there’s no way but through. In another episode, the speaker has an indescribable oppression that is “just a little too persistent. I have to live with it, since I don’t live with him anymore.”
Love can be cruel and tortuous; misleading in that it promises the most but will also leave you and cause you the deepest suffering. Sometimes even while it is present:
Our bodies, our house, our things, everything had to be beautiful. Otherwise, he would say, we can’t go on. He found me fat, dowdy, and brash, brash in how I dressed and the way I spoke. I was ugly and tacky. Because I loved him, I lost fifteen kilos, let him choose my clothes, and above all, I took to living in silence, afraid that with my noise, my everyday noise, the noise of my life, I would annoy him. He thought I was vulgar in spite of everything. I would have liked to shout, to really test the limits of our bodies and our voices; I would have liked to shout, play, take pleasure. I thought that’s what living was about.
Notwithstanding the impossibility of such an act, Trysting attempts to translate emotion into words, and Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis have reenacted this endeavor by translating these words from Pagano’s language to ours. Translation, fittingly, is directly addressed by a translator in love with the writer whose work she translates:
I’ll never dare tell him how I feel . . . And yet I am en tête-à-tête with him almost constantly, when I’m working on his books. I’m in his head, in his language, in his sentences. One day I bumped into his wife, we even had a chat, and I realized that she doesn’t know him as well as I do, I who spend my time probing his most intimate thoughts and examining his every word as I translate his books into French.
To translate a feeling to a written expression and make an emotion literal, physical, to give it form—this is what Pagano succeeds in doing, giving shape to the inexpressible, the fleeting thing felt but never said out loud. Her book is remarkable in its refusal to be limited to the revelatory or the shocking or the surprising. Some of the fragments wander a little—they don’t go off course in terms of theme or subject matter, but they lean to the fantastical, or fable-like, and these feel a step out of place. I didn’t love the final passage of a woman observing a man drawing a tree who attracts all manner of songbird, but it did bring me back to the beginning of the book, the sounds that you hear with someone: “I wake up, and I can hear the sound of little creatures walking around on an invisible cloth stretched tight next to my ear, stretched between me and him.”
I cannot pretend I did not finish working on this review until after the election. And, after the death of Leonard Cohen—news that I received on a bus to Boston, and that brought me to tears. Feeling broken of spirit and of heart, this book review suddenly felt silly. But, as I found various constructive avenues for my nervous energy, I kept thinking about this slim volume—what it means to write and read about love between people, in all its forms, in a time of its glaring absence. I have no great conclusion to offer, but have noted every single act of kindness between strangers over the past days, which are not unlike these trysts—brief, but poignant. Pagano has given us a way in to a feeling that is beyond words, and yet we all know what it is when we have it, and know what it is to be bereft of it. Words matter, and it is no small miracle that Pagano’s offer a safe harbor.
Lauren Goldenberg is Deputy Director at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A former book scout and bookseller, she's a lifelong New Yorker with stints in Chicago and Paris.
Trysting
By Emmanuelle Pagano
Two Lines Press
November 2016
978-1931883566
Reviewed by Michael B. Tager
While reading Trysting by Emanuelle Pagano, something troubled me. Not the prose (which is lovely and beautifully translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis) and certainly not the content. The subject matter of Trysting is often troubling, but I'm an adult and as such, am capable of dissecting complicated material and realizing that relationships are complicated and often unhealthy. I can read challenging material—and Trysting is often challenging—without internalizing trauma. No, the content is justified and forever relevant.
What bothered me was the title itself. Translated from the French, Trysting doesn't seem to address the meat of the book in any particular way. Nouons-Nous, the original French title, seems to be a sort of idiom, one that doesn't make a lot of sense when imported to English (as often happens with idioms). Roughly speaking—let the record show that the reviewer speaks poor Spanish, minimal German, and scant Japanese—Nouons-Nous would translate to "are establishing us." In English, it doesn't quite scan. Perhaps, Establishing Us?
This might seem like quibbling, but it is important, because Trysting is a scattershot book of hundreds of tiny vignettes, encompassing everything from initial encounters to literal trysting, to the dissolution of love, to rape and violence, to unrequited, seen-from-across-the-way romanticism. "Nouons-Nous" drills down to the bedrock of the establishment of us. It's a broad topic that can and does encompass infinite arrays of interpretation. To boil that down to "trysting" seems to downplay the struggle and minimize it. Of course, that may be the point, part of the construction.
What Pagano has constructed here, using sentence-, paragraph-, or page-long vignettes is not a narrative as such. There are no names, no specific characters, no given locations that function as landmarks for the reader. Those coming in with expectations of a story are going to be disappointed. However, what is found within Trysting is no less affecting for its non-linear structure. Although Pagano isn't telling a story, she is telling a theme, telling a tone, telling a part of life that resists too-particular expression. And she's exploring this aspect of life through humor, pathos, through chilling detail and through whimsy.
The vignettes are spaced in such a way as to keep the reader guessing which direction is up. Pagano never quite allows the pieces to fall into order, which would allow the reader to become complacent. Instead, she will pair a lovely description of intimacy, "I love it when he goes around naked in my house. It's as if he lived here," with a simple line of chilling matter-of-factness, "Desire for her made me stronger, a good deal stronger than her." That these vignettes are on opposing pages, offset by a simple description of a cup of coffee and a divorce, illustrates what's inside the pages of Trysting.
Not that everything within is heavy or meant to elicit anything beyond a smile. Segments of Trysting are intended to evoke laughter. Because what happens between two people can be a joyous, miraculous relationship.
He was inaccessible, taken up with his work, his friends, his social life. He never looked at me . . . I waited until he left for a few days over Christmas and I moved into his apartment. I knew where he hid the key. I unpacked and put everything away, leaving no hint of my recent arrival . . . I divided the walk-in closet into two, I mixed our books together . . . I was cooking when he came in . . . When he asked who I was, I acted surprised, indignant, laughing it off . . . He sees me, he looks at me, he touches me, and he's getting used to me.
Of course, even though Pagano judiciously sprinkles levity through her work, there are passages that rend the heart. Divorce, unrequited love, simple dissolution and, of course, death, dwell inside of Trysting. That the words are lyrical and poetic does little to soften the ache when reading the passages that focus on what happens when "us" becomes "me."
I went to the clinic to catch his soul and bring it back home. I had string with me to lead it. A great big ball of thick string. I went up to him, embraced him one last time, rested my lips on already cold eyelids, then took his wrist and tied the string to it, as I had seen my grandmother do with my grandfather's wrist in the local hospital. Then, from this bracelet, I unrolled the ball across the room, down the corridors of the clinic, and out to the courtyard where a taxi was waiting for me. I ignored the looks and questions. I held on to the string through the open car window; he followed me the whole way. I talked to him, telling him to come with me, to come back home. I asked the driver to drive very smoothly so that the string wouldn't get broken. I got out without letting go of the ball, which was almost all gone now, and went into the house. I continued unwinding it all the way into our room, right into the bed. I put the end of the string to bed between our sheets.
How Pagano manages to convey painful truth into lovely, simple prose is a marvel. There's so much beauty in Pagano's words, even translated from her mother tongue to English. The translation work is so seamless that it reads as if it could have been originally written in English. Perhaps it's the sentiment at work. There's something about love, romance, lust, passion, anger, even obsession, that lends itself to thick prose that feels like hands can be run through it. Pagano's translators, perhaps because they're working with such a rich topic, translate fully and evocatively. At no point does Trysting slow down or hold anything back. It's a tapestry of prose throughout.
Pagano won the EU Prize for Literature in 2012 for her novel, Les Adolescents troglodytes and it wouldn't be surprising if she wins another prize for Trysting. It's a lovely, challenging book that delves into a challenging topic in an intriguing, unusual way. How else to explore how to become us than by giving the reader hundreds of "Us-es" and asking them to identify themselves within?