Contemporary Authors

• Sphinx Grasset (Paris, France), 1986
• Pour en Finir Avec le Genre Humain ( Title means "To Put an End to the Human Race") F. Bourin (Parish, France), 1987
• La Décomposition ( title means "Decomposition") Grasset (Paris, France), 1999
• Pas un Jour Grasset (Paris), 2002
• Éros Mélancolique ( Title means "Melancholy Eros") Grasset (Paris, France), 2009

1.  Sphinx LCCN 2015930301 Type of material Book Personal name Garreta, Anne F. Main title Sphinx / Anne Garreta, Emma Ramadan. Edition 1st edition. Published/Produced Dallas, TX : Deep Vellum Pub., 2015. Projected pub date 1504 Description pages cm ISBN 9781941920084 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9781941920091 (ebk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2.  Éros mélancolique : roman LCCN 2009402121 Type of material Book Personal name Roubaud, Jacques. Main title Éros mélancolique : roman / Jacques Roubaud & Anne F. Garréta. Published/Created Paris : Grasset, c2009. Description 298 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9782246751618 CALL NUMBER PQ2678.O77 E8 2009 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3.  Pas un jour : roman LCCN 2002508172 Type of material Book Personal name Garréta, Anne. Main title Pas un jour : roman / Anne F. Garréta. Published/Created Paris : Grasset, c2002. Description 156 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 224663461X CALL NUMBER PQ2667.A7737 P37 2002 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4.  Pour en finir avec le genre humain LCCN 88121171 Type of material Book Personal name Garréta, Anne. Main title Pour en finir avec le genre humain / Anne Garréta. Published/Created Paris : F. Bourin, c1987. Description 158 p. ; 19 cm. ISBN 2876860023 CALL NUMBER MLCS 90/14335 (P) FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5.  La décomposition : roman LCCN 00299272 Type of material Book Personal name Garréta, Anne. Main title La décomposition : roman / Anne F. Garréta. Published/Created Paris : Grasset, c1999. Description 243 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 2246530911 CALL NUMBER PQ2667.A7737 D43 1999 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Not One Day - 2017 Deep Vellum Publishing, Dallas, TX

• Amazon -

  Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalienne (graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx hailed by critics in France and the US alike, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002 for this novel, Not One Day, awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award–-Georges Perec won in 1978).

• Wikipedia -

  Anne F. Garréta
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Anne F. Garréta (born 1962)[citation needed] is a French novelist and a member of the experimental literary group Oulipo. A graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest, A***. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), tells the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994, and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won the Prix Médicis in 2002 for her novel Pas un jour.[1] awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award—Georges Perec won in 1978).
  Works[edit]
  Sphinx (Grasset, 1986); English translation by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum, 2015)[2]
  Pour en finir avec le genre humain (Editions François Bourin, 1987)
  Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990)
  La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999)
  Pas un jour (Grasset, 2002)
  Éros Mélancolique (with Jacques Roubaud) (Grasset, 2009)

• From Publisher -

  Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalien (graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest, A***. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), told the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award–Georges Perec won in 1978), for her latest book, Pas un jour (Grasset, 2002).

• Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/05/the-challenge-of-genderless-characters/482109/

  Quoted in Sidelights: ”It’s not only race that’s emphasized,” Ramadan observed, “it’s their age difference, the fact that A*** is American and the narrator is French, the fact that the narrator is in school and doing intense studies and A*** is a dancer … There are all these differences between them—race probably being the most prominent—that seem to throw up these walls. And when gender’s not there, it sort of leaves room for us to focus on these other differences—and most of them end up being insignificant, too.” “one of them is very intellectual and wants to study and resents the other person for watching too much TV and not being interested in going to these museums with him or her,”
  The Challenge of Genderless Characters
  What a 30-year-old novel reveals about hidden biases

  The cover art for Anne Garréta’s 1986 novel Sphinx
  Deep Velllum

  Stephanie Hayes May 11, 2016 Culture
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  In Maggie Nelson’s bestselling 2015 memoir The Argonauts, she describes her partner as “neither male nor female” but “a special—two for one.” That characterization comes to mind when reading the dedication of Anne Garréta’s 1986 novel Sphinx, which states, simply, “To the third.”
  Sphinx is the fragmented retelling, “ten or maybe thirteen” years after the fact, of a romance between two characters whose genders are never revealed. It was recently translated into English for the first time by Emma Ramadan. In the book, as in Nelson’s work, gender is both central to the text and completely besides the point. The narrator, je (as Ramadan writes), is a disillusioned theology student who leaves academia for the vibrant Parisian night scene. Thrust by tragic circumstance into the DJ booth of a club called Apocryphe, je discovers both a knack for mixing music and a new hobby in “the contemplation of bodies.”
  Related Story

  Chick Lit Remixed: The Simple Brilliance of Gender-Flipping
  In this underworld, je meets A***, an alluring African American dancer from Harlem who’s 10 years je’s senior and addicted to sex and television. Across 120 pages, je pursues A***, their relationship crescendos and crumbles, and je struggles to come to terms with the loss by stringing together the very narrative the book comprises. All the while, even though the characters who swirl around the lovers are assigned genders, it’s never made clear if je or A*** identify as male or female or something else. That friends and family draw fault lines across race and age—other ways in which the lovers differ—but never mention gender only deepens the sense that this particular non-biological binary is inconsequential.
  Fourteen years after Sphinx’s publication, Garréta became the first female member  of Oulipo, a French literary collective whose members are known for imposing constraints on their own writing to prompt creativity (the name is a portmanteau of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or the Workshop for Potential Literature). Oulipian antics include writing an entire novel without the letter ‘e’; describing the same happening in 99 different ways; and recasting a poem by replacing each noun with another, seven nouns away in the dictionary. A member once described Oulipians as rats who build themselves labyrinths from which to escape, but Garréta’s work feels more political, more intentional, than many other Oulipian works. Instead of creating a constraint and working around it, Sphinx highlights the already limiting nature of language when it comes to matters of gender, and of love.

  I talked with Emma Ramadan about the possibilities and limitations of writing without gender.

  Stephanie Hayes: So, how did you happen upon and begin translating Sphinx, almost 30 years after it was first published?
  Emma Ramadan: A couple of years ago, I read this book written by the youngest (at the time) Oulipo member, Daniel Levin Becker [Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature]. Having just been inducted into the collective, he’d written about its history and its members—and he’d mentioned Sphinx and Anne Garréta. The constraint of Sphinx was so fascinating to me that I was curious to see how it had been put into English. I was searching and searching and finally realized nobody had translated it—which seemed very weird to me, because, at the time, conversations about gender were starting to become more and more prevalent, and the ways we think about gender were starting to loosen up in really interesting ways. Anne had written something so ahead of her time and maybe people weren’t quite ready to talk about what’s in this book 30 years ago, but they’re ready now. People have caught up to her.
  Hayes: Reading Sphinx, I found myself constantly searching for clues as to the lovers’ genders, somehow thinking that might help me better understand or, even just picture, them. A*** was particularly slippery and ambivalent, described at having hips “narrow and broad at the same time,” and a “cat-like or divine” body with “musculature seemingly sculpted by Michelangelo.” This made me wonder if Garréta had certain genders in mind when she wrote the characters or not.

  Ramadan: I remember asking Anne this once and she kind of gave me this look like, Are you kidding me? She said she wrote these characters to be genderless—and she certainly does things on the page to mess with perceptions of gender. Like, you know how nouns of body parts have genders that match the nouns themselves and not the person they’re attached to? Well, there are two specific scenes I’m thinking of where Garréta has written the description of A*** so that the body parts alternate masculine, feminine, masculine, feminine. Or, she mentions the head, which is feminine in French—la tête—and the rest of the body parts she chooses to mention are all masculine. The way she crafted Sphinx was very purposeful.
  Hayes: While you were translating, did you ever mentally assign them genders?
  Ramadan: I gave them genders, because I was able to picture them and they came to life for me. And I think that’s a good thing. But I would slap myself on the wrist when I was talking about one of the characters and accidentally used a gender pronoun. Once you realize that you’re doing it, you think: Why do I think that A*** is a woman? Or, What about the narrator makes me think he’s a man? What is it about me that’s projecting that onto these characters? Because it’s not coming from the book. I think it’s a powerful and necessary thing, this looking inward.
  Sphinx highlights the already limiting nature of language when it comes to matters of gender, and of love.
  A little side note, because I think you’ll find this interesting. So, as you might’ve gathered, I thought A*** was a woman. And when I was translating, I was trying really hard not to insert any “hers,” but there’d be moments when my advisor would find a “her” in the translation. And funnily enough, when I got the final proof, I suddenly found a “her” still in the text that nobody had caught. Like five people had read the text at this point and not one had caught it because they had all thought A*** was a woman, so they glossed right over it.
  I was worried that my reading of [the characters] would seep into my translation and that everyone would think A*** is a woman because I had and I’d accidentally slipped in descriptions that were more in keeping of my idea of what is female or something. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The majority of people I’ve talked to have thought they were both men, which surprises me. Someone invited me to a book club about Sphinx in New York, a couple of months ago. I went in and sat in on their discussion and they were all so convinced that the narrator was a man, because at the beginning the narrator was talking about being in theological studies and how he or she didn’t want to go down the road of being in the church. And they all read that as women don’t study to become part of the church, that’s not how it works, only men do that, so therefore the narrator must be a man. I never read it this way, but that might be because I know Garréta was a DJ, like the narrator, and a lesbian.

  Hayes: As you explain in your translator’s note, French has grammatical gender and English has semantic gender. Can you explain some of the specific challenges and tricks of translating a French genderless novel into English?
  Ramadan: When you’re writing in the first person in English, it’s easier to avoid gender. It would be almost impossible for a narrator to reveal their gender without stating it explicitly. And aside from that you mostly have to avoid personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. In French, I think it’s much harder to write a story about people without genders—it requires gender agreement with verbs in the past tense and with adjectives.
  The reason this book was so difficult was because, in French, one of the easiest ways to describe people is by describing bodies—because the gender agreement happens with the noun of the body part, not the person it’s attached to. So, this book is all about bodies: the narrator watching A*** dance, the narrator watching A*** sleep, the narrator remembering A*** … there’s just a lot of bodies!
  There’s a whole page in the book where the narrator is thinking about the ghost of A***’s presence, A***’s body, touching A*** … There was just an entire page where I was like, Oh god, what am I going to do? Body parts need possessive adjectives in English. You say “his arm” or “her leg.” Someone might write a novel in English now using one of the many gender-neutral pronouns we can use these days, like I’ve seen the letter ‘x’ or the letter ‘z’, and different riffs on this, to avoid it altogether. But that approach just seemed very out of place for this book, because these aren’t people who are choosing not to discuss their gender, they’re just people whose genders we happen not to know.
  “When gender’s not there, it sort of leaves room for us to focus on these other differences—and most of them end up being insignificant, too.”
  What I ended up doing was alternating between using A***’s name, or pluralizing—saying something like “our thighs touching”—or just taking every pronoun out and making A*** a jumble of body parts. A*** is already, in French, just a jumble of body parts and the narrator even talks about that. In English, A*** becomes even more so. At first I thought that was really unfortunate, that I was changing the tone of the book or the character. But later it sort of clicked to me that it makes a lot of sense for A*** to be a collection of body parts, because A*** never once speaks in the novel, because of the constraint.

  Hayes: Right, but because of the novel’s constraint, you can’t attribute character traits like those, or problems in their relationship, to gender. One difference that is offered as a problem again and again is race—do you see Sphinx as a musing on race or on difference more broadly?
  Ramadan: Right. When the narrator is trying to get A*** to sleep with him or her, the language becomes sort of militaristic, words like “conquer” come up. And, we can’t say it’s gender driving this.
  And it’s not only race that’s emphasized, it’s their age difference, the fact that A*** is American and the narrator is French, the fact that the narrator is in school and doing intense studies and A*** is a dancer … There are all these differences between them—race probably being the most prominent—that seem to throw up these walls. And when gender’s not there, it sort of leaves room for us to focus on these other differences—and most of them end up being insignificant, too.
  Ultimately, their relationship falling apart has nothing to do with what gender or race or age they were. It really boils down to the fact that one of them is very intellectual and wants to study and resents the other person for watching too much TV and not being interested in going to these museums with him or her. They just fundamentally have different personalities.
  Hayes: So what’s next for you?
  Ramadan: I’m translating another Garréta book, Pas Un Jour, or Not One Day in English. This book has a constraint, too, but this one doesn’t affect me. Anne sat down in front of a typewriter or in front of her laptop everyday for five hours and wrote each chapter in here in that time span without editing or erasing anything. Each chapter is about a woman in her life that she had loved or that had loved her, it’s a reflection on all these sexual or amorous encounters. They’re all autobiographical, except one, which is fiction—and she doesn’t say which.
  Anne got really excited about me translating this book and, as opposed to Sphinx, she was very gung-ho about being more involved. So we’ve been Skyping about it. It’s been more collaborative this time around.

• Romance Studies, Duke University Website - https://romancestudies.duke.edu/people/profile/anne-garreta

  Anne Garreta

  Research Professor of Literature
  External address: 101D Friedl Bldg, Literature Program, Durham, NC 27708
  Phone: (919) 668-5389
  Links
  http://literature.aas.duke.edu
  Overview
  (active tab)
  Publications
  Professional Activities
  Education:
  Ph.D., New York University 1988

• Conversational Reading - http://conversationalreading.com/nine-questions-for-emma-ramada-on-anne-garreta-sphinx-and-not-one-day/

  Nine Questions for Emma Ramadan on Anne Garréta, Sphinx, and Not One Day

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  In addition to being one of the most impressive new translators to come onto the scene in recent years, Emma Ramadan is a good friend. I was very pleased to see her translation of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx become a huge success, and I was excited to see that Emma then began work on a second translation of Garréta’s. That book is now with us, Not One Day, a sort of catalogue/journey-through-memory of Garréta’s experiences with women. That book is now published.
  When Emma is not translating, she is preparing to open a new independent bookstore called Riffraff with Tom Roberge, formerly of New Directions and the prestigious French bookstore, Albertine, on New York’s Upper East Side.
  I reached out to Emma via email to learn a little more about Not One Day, as well as her experiences with Sphinx and Garréta.
  Scott Esposito: Most people reading this interview will know of Anne Garréta through her first novel, Sphinx, which you also translated. That novel has been very often described as a “genderless love story,” and, indeed, never revealing the gender of the two lovers at the center of the novel is that book’s foremost constraint. Sphinx granted Garréta entry into the Oulipo, where she would continue to write books employing various constraints. So, can you tell us a little about what the premise of this book is, and some of the constraints employed therein?
  Emma Ramadan: Not One Day begins “Why not write something different, differently than you usually do? Once more, but with a new twist, rid yourself of your self…Since you can no longer conceive of writing except in long and intricate constructions, isn’t it time to go against the grain?” But unable to resist her self, Garréta proceeds to set up a series of constraints that have come to feel characteristic to her writing. “If you aim to thwart your habits and inclinations, you might as well go about it systematically.” And so we get the constraints. Garréta vows to write every day, for 5 hours straight, for a month, teasing out the memory of one story of desire each day, a woman she has desired, a woman who has desired her, (hence the idea not one day without a woman), or a different kind of desire altogether. Written in the order they come to mind. Arranged alphabetically rather than chronologically. No pen, “nothing but the keyboard,” no draft, no notes, writing only from memory. Not writing things as they happened, or might have happened, or as she wished they had happened, but as they appear to her in memory in that moment. No erasing, no rewriting, “syntax matching composition.” The ultimate aim being to dissipate herself through this process, “in order to dispel the desires that you still feel.” These constraints are clearly laid out in the Ante Scriptum at the beginning of the book, but Garréta hints in the Post Scriptum that some of these rules may have been broken in the process.
  SE: To talk about Sphinx for a moment, this book has been very successful in your translation, and you’ve had the opportunity to do events in support of that book and to represent it in various capacities. Can you tell us about some of the reactions to this book by readers you encountered?
  ER: I was blown away by the incredible response to Sphinx. People really seemed to connect with the book, which I think speaks to the power of Garréta’s fictional world to embody precisely what it is people seek out in their own realities, but are often unable to inhabit because of the nature of the society they live in. Ultimately Sphinx is the demonstration that gender is just one more false binary that has been imposed on us by outside forces. Many of us feel a disconnect between our lived experience and the ways we are told and expected to live in the world. By creating the possibility for a new way of talking about love and relationships that doesn’t have to subscribe to typical constructions of gender, Sphinx has carved out a space where people can project themselves onto these genderless characters in a way that they can’t always with characters in other books, providing a different experience for each reader. It was pretty fucking special to meet and talk with other people who found this opportunity in Sphinx to be as necessary and effective as I did.
  SE: Do you feel that Not One Day provides some of the same opportunities for the reader to project him or herself into the text?
  ER: Yes, but maybe not in such a straightforward way as in Sphinx. Not One Day is, essentially, one woman’s memories, experiences. And while many of those experiences may be relatable for some, many of them won’t be. But the conclusions Garréta draws from her memories, about desire and the way we talk or write about desire, the way desire is expected to play out versus the ways it manifests in reality, those conclusions can certainly be adapted to anyone’s experience, and are meant to provoke thought in everyone who reads the book about their own relationships. So in a lot of ways, the take-aways do resemble those of Sphinx, but they’re grounded in one person’s reality rather than taking form in a fictional space.
  SE: What were some of the challenges of translating this book? Some of the pleasures?
  ER: The biggest challenge for me in translating this book was the same I faced in translating Sphinx: Anne Garréta is a genius who puts her genius ideas into writing in a way that can be difficult for the average human to understand, let alone rewrite in English. The Ante Scriptum and the Post Scriptum are pure thought, and Anne and I Skyped and went over almost every line of those chapters so I could better get in her head to translate them. Another challenge was that I strongly believe in the idea of translating constrained writing by applying that same constraint to yourself, as I did with Sphinx, but for this book it just wasn’t possible. Translating each chapter in five hours without any editing just wasn’t going to be feasible, particularly not for a book like this.
  The biggest pleasure of translating this book was how personal it is. It was a new experience for me to delve so deep into the life and mind of an author, especially someone like Anne whose writing I think of generally as deeply intellectually driven. There’s a lot of vulnerability and humanity in this book, and it’s a nice change to translate someone’s life as opposed to someone’s words.
  SE: It’s clear that Garréta’s writing has touched you really deeply. It I’m not mistaken, Sphinx was the first book of hers that you read. Could you talk briefly about how you discovered Sphinx and why you wanted to translate it?
  ER: I read about Sphinx in Daniel Levin-Becker’s book Many Subtle Channels, which is about the members of the Oulipo and their work. I was curious to see how it had been translated in English, since gender works so differently in the French language than it does in the English language. And when I realized that no one had translated it yet, I wanted to see if I was up to the challenge.
  SE: Which episodes from Not One Day did you like the best?
  ER: I loved translating B*. It felt very real, this idea of pacing the room, replaying your encounters with a given person, debating whether or not to make a move. I could imagine the scene very clearly in my mind, could feel Anne’s anxiety. I also liked translating K* because as I was translating it, I felt as though I was discovering along with Anne her true feelings for K*. The process of realizing things as you flesh them out in writing is on full display here.
  SE: I like that idea, using the same time constraint to translation the book that Garréta used to write it. You mentioned that she wrote this book in a month. How long did the translation take?
  ER: To be fair, in the Post Scriptum at the end of the book, Anne reveals: “As for writing every day or even every night, that was rather optimistic… Did you really bank on so easily curing yourself of your cardinal vice—procrastination?…What should have been a month’s work was disseminated over more than a year.” It probably took me, also, just over a year, editing time included.
  SE: Which constraint of Garréta’s (from any book, story, etc, translated or not) do you find most fascinating?
  ER: Anne’s novel La Décomposition has as its protagonist a serial killer who systematically assassinates the characters of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Anne once showed me an enormous binder full of the notes she used to write that book. She has called it “a strategy for reversing the censorship, for opening the potentiality of the Proustian text.” Which is pretty great. But Sphinx‘s constraint is still really exciting to me, it has so much explosive potential to it, I’d like to see everything from Greek myths to nursery rhymes to the literary canon rewritten without any indication of sex or gender.

  SE: What’s next for you and Garréta? Another book? Other projects?
  ER: Honestly, I’m not sure! I heard a rumor that she’s been producing a lot of new writing recently, so who knows…

Quoted in Sidelights: “a short but deep exploration of the nature and complexity of desire and longing.”
Not One Day

264.9 (Feb. 27, 2017): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Not One Day Anne Garreta, trans. from the French by Emma Ramadan. Deep Vellum (Consortium, dist.), $14.95 trade paper (150p) ISBN 978-1941920-54-1
From Oulipo member and French author of the genderless love story Sphinx comes a short but deep exploration of the nature and complexity of desire and longing. The newly translated work is laid out like a confessional writing experiment. For five hours each day over the course of a month, Garreta aims to record unedited memories of past romances as she remembers them. The project stretches on for more than a year, and the end result is a series of 12 vignettes that ranges in intensity and focus. The women she describes come in all stripes. There's C* in the Roman night club, whom she was both attracted to and repulsed by; E*, a boring married novelist who used Garreta to explore extramarital same-sex fantasies; and D*, who sparked a weekend-long spree of orgiastic sex in every position and involving every piece of furniture. In recounting her friendship with the older K*, Garreta realizes for the first time how much she adores and misses her. While the idea of such a collection seems either refreshingly lurid or self-indulgent, Garreta's prose leans more toward distanced and academic than erotic. Though she asks pressing questions throughout--"How many times have we truly, savagely, imperatively desired a body?"; how do you know if a conquest reciprocates your feelings?; Is it possible to rid yourself of the self?--the book's final chapter hints at her dissatisfaction with both her methods of inquiry and the answers she's finally left with. (Apr.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Not One Day." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 72+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485671149&it=r&asid=57c88033598349e65e641ccede77c730. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485671149

Anne Garreta: Sphinx. (Nota Bene)
Quoted in Sidelights: “deeply evocative.”

89.6 (November-December 2015): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Anne Garréta
Sphinx
Emma Ramadan, tr.
Deep Vellum

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A unique novel, Sphinx succeeds in telling a love story without names or genders, allowing the reader to interpret the novel however they wish. Set in Paris and calling to mind the work of James Baldwin, this both feminist and LGBT book is deeply evocative in its word usage as it celebrates love without the constraints of gender.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Anne Garreta: Sphinx. (Nota Bene)." World Literature Today, vol. 89, no. 6, 2015, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA432797583&it=r&asid=419719d9a4e02aa0ea30d7f466966b57. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A432797583

"Not One Day." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 72+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485671149&asid=57c88033598349e65e641ccede77c730. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017. "Anne Garreta: Sphinx. (Nota Bene)." World Literature Today, vol. 89, no. 6, 2015, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA432797583&asid=419719d9a4e02aa0ea30d7f466966b57. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.

• National
  https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/anne-garr%C3%A9ta-s-new-novel-a-question-of-language-and-imagination-1.68758
  Word count: 847

  Anne Garréta’s new novel a question of language and imagination
  Anne Garréta is an Oulipian: a French experimental literary group who apply mathematical constraints to their writing. Surprisingly, her novel translates rather well.

  Joanna Walsh
  April 23, 2015
  Updated: April 23, 2015 04:00 AM
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  Garréta’s novel questions gender roles. Patrick Guedj / Getty Images
  Sphinx
  Anne Garréta
  Deep Vellum Publishing
  Dh60
  Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986) is the first novel translated into English by a female member of the French experimental literary group Oulipo, whose members apply mathematical constraints to their writing in the hope, as founding member Raymond Queneau said, of building “the labyrinth from which they will try to escape”.
  Appropriately, it poses a riddle. Members of the Oulipo are divided over whether the linguistic or mathematical “constraint” of a work should be revealed to the reader. The experience of reading Sphinx, writes American Oulipian Daniel Levin-Becker in his introduction, is enhanced if the reader remains in the dark.
  Those not wanting to know should look away now, as it’s impossible to discuss the novel’s achievement without giving the game away.
  Writing in French, a language in which many verbs and almost all adjectives have gender agreement, Garréta creates a work that gives no hint of the sex of either the narrator or his (or her) lover, a feat matched by Garréta’s translator, Emma Ramadan, for whom the constraints of English posed different but parallel challenges.
  Rather than creating an Oulipian “constraint”, Sphinx highlights the already gendered nature of the French language, and of French society: “Were there really women who wore these blood-red bodices, purple garter belts, and sheer lace thongs?” Garréta’s narrator wonders, passing a seedy Pigalle shop. A theology student turned DJ, s/he lives in a world that is utterly gendered, but in which gender is so performative that it can be put on and off easily by either sex. The trick of the text is to see what genders your imagination conjures.
  Garréta’s narrator is down on boundaries, not only of gender, but also of class. S/he criticises “the overall intellectual weakness of the sons and daughters of well-established families”, to whom s/he is happy to compare him/herself favourably. S/he is also disgusted by France’s philosophical tradition “this distressing, foul-smelling intellectualism – also known as ‘­existentialism’” – and has a horror of the physical: of Michel the DJ who dies in a toilet. Sphinx’s narrator is looking for something else: “Beauty is just as vapid as its distinctions. I was running after the sublime, where everything is good.”
  S/he meets it in A***, a lover s/he makes an embodiment of what the French thinkers the narrator despises would call “the Other”. A*** is (literarily) black to the narrator’s white, gregarious where the narrator is reclusive, sensual where s/he is intellectual. S/he is fascinated by A***’s dancer’s physique “the time it took for a body always to appear smooth, hairless, supple, and flawless: in a word, angelic.” The body may be divine, but it can only be seen in such close focus that individual limbs can hardly be distinguished: we are left with flesh and bone, plus a few spinning hormones.
  “How do you see me, anyway?” A*** accuses the narrator, as their relationship falters. It is no accident that the narrator’s studies concern Apophatic theology, which meets the inability of the human to speak of the divine by describing only what God is not. The narrator self-­reproaches for being unable to tackle love in language that is not reflexive: “A response came to my lips, which I murmured pensively in the silence: ‘I see you in a mirror’.”
  The most interesting works of the Oulipo question language, and experiment with its ability to convey reality. Oulipian practices are commonly concerned not with adding, but with taking away, for example the technique of “slenderising”, or consistently removing certain letters: the best-know example being Georges Perec’s A Void, written without the letter e. These techniques attack writing itself.
  Ironically, Garréta’s narrator attempts personal redemption by “writing” the book we’re reading, in which memories are recounted not as order, but as brief, fleshly experiences, answering Garréta’s first-page teaser: “Why do I always live only in memory?”. This reminds me of Perec’s obsession with noting mundane details “to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive: to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows”.
  Perhaps the riddle of identity retold is at the heart of the Oulipian ­experiment: not a missing “e” but the missing “I”, and its corresponding, absent “u”.

  This book is available on Amazon.
  Joanna Walsh is a United Kingdom-based writer. She edits fiction at 3: AM magazine and runs @read_women.

  thereview@thenational.ae

• Huffington Post
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sphinx-is-an-erotic-novel-without-genders_us_55b13905e4b0a9b948540bcd
  Word count: 857

  07/30/2015 08:41 am ET
  ‘Sphinx’ Is An Erotic Novel Without Genders
  Boy meets girl. Or boy meets boy. Or girl meets girl. In Anne F. Garréta’s novel, gender is beside the point.

  By Maddie Crum

  Deep Vellum

  In Margaret Atwood’s classic, cheeky short story “Happy Endings” she takes a swift jab at the tropes we rely on when we tell stories — love stories in particular.
  “John and Mary meet,” she writes. “What happens next? If you want a happy ending, try A.” She then reveals a myriad of outcomes that can occur between John and Mary’s budding relationship: they grow old together, Mary’s love goes unrequited from a selfish John, Mary uses John for personal gain. Etc., etc.
  Though Atwood is demonstrating that a life can’t be reduced to a formula, she’s also suggesting that there are only so many possible arcs that John and Mary’s life can follow — at least if John and Mary are fictional characters, crafted within a fictional story.
  Enter Anne F. Garréta, a French author whose experimental tricks aim to make readers question the strictures we apply to our love stories. In particular, she’s interested in how gender influences how we write about romance, and her newly translated novel, Sphinx, avoids gendered descriptors altogether in its characterization of its two protagonists.
  The story begins with a nameless narrator drifting away from a sturdy academic life as a religious studies student (in France, or at least in the world of the book, racking up ample education is not what drifters do, it’s what ambitious people do), and towards a pulsing, sensuous nightclub scene. Disillusioned with the rigidity of school, he or she begins frequenting the Apocryphe, where tragic happenstance turns into a regular DJing gig. The narrator quickly discovers a knack for fluidly mixing tracks, a hobby that serves as a distraction from a newfound love interest: A***, a desired cabaret dancer.
  The relationship begins with one-sided lust. The narrator pines after A***, who’s described as having slender, strong legs and a cat-like face (hence the novel’s title, which refers also to a song starring a coy, capricious sphinx). Shallow outward differences are pointed out; one is black, while the other is pale from always holing up inside studying. Beyond that, physical attributes — or at least those that can be rattled off in straightforward description — factor little into the pair’s coupling. Although A*** is mostly concerned with kinesthetic pursuits, such as dancing, exercise and sunbathing, the narrator is unconcerned with physical particularities. The sheer fact of A***’s sensual nature is appealing, as it offers a distraction from the tedium of school.

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  But, as the narrator realizes that their differences make cohabitation a struggle, and A*** realizes that the narrator’s infatuation may be shallow and fleeting, their connection slowly weakens, and each is forced to reconsider what their once-strong bond meant. The set-up is such a classic, relatable tale of falling in — and out — of love that one wonders why gender has always been such a huge factor in how we discuss relationships, in fiction and otherwise.
  Constructing such a story would be laborious enough had it been written originally in English — crafting a romance, and fully realized characters with fully realized ambitions and desires, is unfortunately difficult to remove from our learned roles as men and women. But in French the job is even harder: many verbs, including “go,” are gendered in the past tense. So the words the author opted for to convey the narrator’s actions — wandering, roaming, visiting — were genderless, and shaped who he or she was as a person.
  Emma Ramadan, who translated the book into English, wrote in a note at the end: “Garréta believed that equality could not exist within a language that puts the two genders in opposition to each other.” So, the author, and the translator, created their own language, championing love and desire over power and difference.
  The bottom line: The author tinkers not only with language, but also with social norms, to reveal that gender isn’t essential to how we talk about love. 
  Who wrote it? Anne F. Garréta is a French author. Sphinx is her first novel to be translated into English. She belongs to the same experimental literary group as Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. 
  Who will read it? Those interested in feminist or LGBT literature. Those interested in experimental writing or love stories. 
  Opening lines: “Remembering saddens me still, even years later. How many exactly, I don’t know anymore. Ten or maybe thirteen. And why do I always live only in memory?”
  Notable passage: “The machine was running on empty, racing, turning out a fortune without producing an iota of delight: no one enjoyed themselves in the least in these clubs, and I started to doubt whether anyone ever had.”

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/05/the-whimsy-and-discipline-of-anne-garretas-not-one-day/
  Word count: 1137

  The Whimsy and Discipline of Anne Garréta’s Not One Day
  Reviewed By Sebastian Sarti
  May 2nd, 2017

  In her Prix Médicis winning novel Not One Day, Anne Garréta claims she will subject herself to the “discipline of confessional writing.” Given its associations with self-indulgence, it’s odd for her to describe confessional writing as a discipline. It’s stranger still for a book of confessional writing to come from a member of the experimental collective the Oulipo and from the writer of Sphinx, which shrouded personal intimacies in a political and constrained syntax. But Garréta applies an academic rigor to the past love affairs she describes in Not One Day, so they become catalysts rather than destinations for her writing.
  Members of the Oulipo (French for “Ouvroir de littérature,” or Workshop for Potential Literature) often deploy chance, rules of language, and mathematical forms to produce innovative works. They take as their precept the notion that constrained frameworks spur literary invention. Like Garréta’s novels, their works are often both playful and disciplined. Their methods often create significant erasures and absences, as in the movement’s most famous novel, Georges Perec’s La disparition, a 300-page lipogram that never uses a word with the letter ‘e’ (the English translation by Gilbert Adair, A Void, also follows this rule), or Garréta’s Sphinx, where the excision of gender allows the narrator and the narrator’s love to exist in a Schrodingerian state in which they are simultaneously both and neither genders.
  Not One Day doesn’t use such explicit erasure. Still, it plans to follow the Oulipian tradition of using strictures to inspire creativity. The narrator—a somewhat fictional Garréta whose apocryphal identity calls to mind the autofictional narrators of writers like Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Jenny Offill—plans to write for five hours a day for thirty days, each day on a different love affair, which she will pick capriciously. At the end, she will place the accounts in alphabetical order of the women’s names. Her plan provides both Oulipian whimsy and discipline; the rules seem arbitrary, but the adherence to them is meant to be strict.
  Garréta reproduces her past love affairs with long asides and perambulating reflections. When one woman inspires equal parts repulsion and desire, the narrator discusses how she “sought out the defects” and “inventoried the adjectives that might vanquish” her desire. Then she begins an extended series of ruminations on attraction, all of which give no better answer than the one she started with: desire “like repulsion, is without reason and defies explanation.”
  Often the reflections reveal the narrator’s own preoccupations with literature, interpretation, semantics, and secrecy. In one long aside, Garréta compares novels to car engines. “Literature,” she says, “takes after mechanics more so than religion. You see in it neither transcendence nor the ineffable.” Suggestive of the Oulipian interest in merging literature with the constructed forms of mathematics and sciences, she declares literature is merely “valves, cylinders, ignitions.”
  Significantly, the women are more like muses than people. The narrator often removes their particulars. She might say she “inventoried the adjectives,” but she does not give those adjectives. She whittles their names to initials: C*, D*, K*, N* etc. One woman is only the “memory of a body: inscribed in a given space, anchored in light.”
  In one telling instance, the woman cannot even be such a memory, because her identity is unknown to the narrator. The narrator learns of her from a friend, who tells her some woman in the narrator’s self-defense class has a crush on her. This knowledge causes her to spend the class with a “sharp, unprecedented consciousness of the weight of bodies, the proximity of faces.” The mystery creates a longing and an absence that allow for the narrator’s expansive imagination to take hold.
  Of this unfixed woman she writes, “No certain sign. You are grateful to her for that. The mystery of her identity, the search for signs, the hermeneutic passions it inspired in you, made the semester of self-defense the most arousing erotic experience of your life.” In an Oulipian turn, the woman’s unknown identity infuses the class with a degree of chance. This chance broadens the possibilities: each person with whom the narrator wrestles might be the one to want her, each motion might be a gesture of desire.
  Translated by Emma Ramadan, who also translated the syntactically challenging Sphinx, Not One Day matches the elusive, circuitous narratives with baroque and analytical prose. The novel’s elliptical style gives rise to its unsentimental focus on desire, memory, and fantasy as objects that flourish in voids. Desire for something arises when its possession is impossible. People inspire passion by becoming ciphers.
  Garréta’s conspicuous absences allow for something to become ubiquitous in a way that its occasional presence cannot. When you premise your work on a rigorous constraint, you fill it with blanks and their potential. The many excisions in Not One Day inspire reflection on all it has removed. The women exist in quantum states, infused with a captivating mysticism. But this style runs the risk of turning such a novel into more of an academic exercise than an immersive experience. Not One Day never escapes the strain of its own writing.
  In one notable departure from the investigative style, we learn of K*, who was a friend before she became a lover. The prose becomes vivid and lush, romantic even. We hear of the “incredible light of a late afternoon after a storm that has rinsed the air and rendered a hallucinatory purity to the facades, the trees, all the objects it bathed, leaving behind a pale, bloodless sky, violently intensifying colors, expressing an unbearable darkness from the trunks of trees.” For a moment we’re allowed to experience a scene rather than simply read her explication of it, and it’s a welcome departure from the surrounding abstractions.
  Garréta ends her indulgence with a defeatist question. “Could you even render a cubist portrait of her,” she asks, “No, not even. Indecipherable. What machine, what fiction must you invent or construct to manage to capture what would only be an abstract figure of K*, a figure pierced with ellipses.” The machine she describes is the one we hold in our hands, this fiction that we read. Garréta suggests that the novel is only an index; if we are frustrated by it, it’s because she is attempting to produce an intellectually honest inspection of desire. If people cannot be captured, if “there are only erasures,” then might as well seek them in elisions, where their potential remains.

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2015/06/sphinx-by-anne-garreta/
  Word count: 1242

  Quoted in Sidelights: “opposites attract, symmetrical narrative arcs, black ‘soul’ and white puritanism,” but allowed that never revealing the lovers’ gender “deeply enriches the text.”
  Sphinx by Anne Garréta
  Reviewed By Connor Goodwin
  June 29th, 2015

  Sphinx by Anne Garréta is a slender novel that tells the tale of two lovers in Paris. Its setting is not the literary Paris that comes to mind: cafes filled with artists and intellectuals, evening strolls through wide boulevards. Sphinx takes place in afterhours clubs and cabarets—the underbelly of Paris. This is a love story between DJ and dancer, between the narrator and A***.
  Although Sphinx was written prior to Garréta joining the Oulipo, it nevertheless exhibits their approach to writing. Raymond Queneau, founding member of the Oulipo, famously described the group as “Rats who build their own labyrinth from which they try to escape.” Oulipian constraints typically operate on linguistic aspects of writing and result in a kind of linguistic play. At worst, these constraints are merely a word game, absent of any meaning. At best, they reinvigorate literature as a mode of expression through innovative formal techniques that advance themes of the work. For example, Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel-length lipogram that doesn’t use the letter E, reflects on themes of loss and incompleteness.
  The constraint Garréta uses in Sphinx is notable because it is rooted foremost in semantics, which has specific linguistic consequences. Garréta purposely omits any mention of either lover’s gender. This presented certain difficulties for the translator, Emma Ramadan. She sums it up best when she writes, “In French, the subject’s gender can be identified as soon as there is agreement with a verb in the past tense or with an adjective, whereas in English the subject’s gender can only be identified through personal pronouns and possessive adjectives.” Garréta does not use any pronouns (she/he) or possessive pronouns (her/his) that would indicate the gender of either A*** or the narrator. Instead, they are identified by name or body part (body parts are gendered in French, but not indicative of sex).
  To write a genderless narrative is inherently a political act, and Sphinx is born from the experiences of marginalized subjects who are constrained in everyday life by social norms. But Garréta manages to avoid participating in a politics of identity by eliminating gender altogether rather than trying to represent the experience of a specific marginalized subject.
  Writing from the unconscious is characteristic of Surrealist “automatic” writing; the Oulipo have tended to avoid it. But Sphinx dances between unconscious and conscious modes of narration. The majority of the narrator’s actions are habitual—contemplating bodies, clubbing, reading. This is partly a consequence of Garréta’s use of the imperfect tense; in French, the imperfect tense is not necessarily marked by gender, unlike most tenses, so it’s perfect for Garréta’s purposes. As a result, the sequence of events becomes muddled and fragmented. The narrator frequently acknowledges this, “My memory of all this is broken, incomplete. All those nights ended up melting into one, jerky and repetitive like the music.” However, the fragments that do surface from this unconscious reservoir are vividly and eloquently incarnated. This is particularly true of the prose around lights, music, and bodies—the primary elements that compose nightclubs. They are rendered in rapturous tones: “a sweltering, vitrified clash of light and flesh in the swaying red darkened with so many lights that there was neither dusk nor dawn.” And: “I was in a coma agitated by rhythms that were more and more painfully arousing my desire without ever draining it.” I could go on—exquisite fragments like these are packaged in nearly every page.

  Anne Garréta
  Without gender operating as a signifier of identity, Garréta can give greater attention to bodies. Indeed, this is how the narrator meets A***: “So I must have first spotted A*** during a melancholic, disinterested contemplation of a succession of bodies I wasn’t trying hard to distinguish.” Garréta’s feverish descriptions of A*** are even more enticing than her descriptions of dancing in clubs. She has us stroking the page as if it were skin, fingering its edges, ready to turn and continue reading.
  A*** crossing the stage in the feline roving of the choreography, embodying an enigmatic, silent figure twisting to the extreme limit of dislocation in miraculous movements that were syncopated but not staccato. Even as this body fades away a spectral figure remains, immobile; the stage is populated with incarnations, sudden gestures, hieratic poses set in a relentless progression. There was something cat-like or divine in this body that, moved by some sly, sensual pleasure, was embodying in nonchalant strides a languid damnation, an immemorial fatality made into movement.
  Bodies are reflected, massed, fragmented, “spectral.” The narrator idealizes A*** to the extent that A*** becomes a mere surface onto which the narrator projects a fantasy. “I watched A***’s body mutate into an image.” And then there’s the assemblage of bodies on the dance floor, “The numerous innumerable bodies made up a monster of a hundred heads and tangled limbs whose only cohesion and life force came from the rhythmic impulse I dealt to it.” Perhaps these bodies are made all the more lucid precisely because of their mutations.
  The imagery of assemblage and A***’s “cat-like” body allude to the title, Sphinx. The sphinx is a combination of various parts of a lion, human, and sometimes bird, whose sex varies in different mythologies. The sphinx posed a riddle to Oedipus: What walks on four legs, then two, then three? Oedipus answered correctly: Man. In doing so, he failed to recognize women. This failure to recognize women turned fatal when Oedipus, unable to recognize his own mother, married her. Garréta plays off Oedipus’ misrecognition of women by refusing to recognize gender altogether in the case of the narrator and A***.
  When I set aside the constraint and the texture of the prose and look at the plot of Sphinx, I shrug. The narrative arc and the main characters are all too familiar. Love at first sight, a drawn out courtship, a tragic end. And yes, opposites do attract. Perhaps Garétta omits gender to show it is inessential to such narratives. The frustration of trying and failing to detect the gender of A*** and the narrator would appear to indicate the success of Garétta’s constraint. Nevetheless, Garréta would have written a better book, and a better Oulipian book, if she had not used these binary tropes—opposites attract, symmetrical narrative arcs, black “soul” and white puritanism. Had she tried instead to abandon these patterns and forms, to dissolve these restrictive molds in favor of new or hybrid genres, the book would be more compelling.
  Sphinx illustrates the political potential of Oulipian constraints. The Oulipo have typically withdrawn from politics in favor of contemplating new literary forms. But, as Garréta eloquently demonstrates, to engage in political writing does not come at the expense of literary merit. In fact, the political constraint in Sphinx deeply enriches the text. The Oulipo should expand their interest in potential forms of literature to include potential uses of literature. Sphinx is a decisive and welcome move in this direction.

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2017/04/13/reviews/sam-allingham/not-one-day-anne-garreta/
  Word count: 3221

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The analytic aspect of Garréta’s writing is apt and incisive,” related Full Stop online critic Sam Allingham. “Her essayistic style is complex but lucid and, for the most part, direct.” He thought that “by the end one begins to detect a certain narrowness of scope,” but added that in “the best parts of Garréta’s project … erotic life presents itself outside the stale plots and tired metaphors of court intrigue, in moments of immanence and recognition.”
  Not One Day – Anne Garréta
  by Sam Allingham

  [Deep Vellum; 2017]
  Tr. by Emma Ramadan
  How can a writer address desire, without giving in to the lazy cliches of the confessional — especially now, with the confessional at the center of contemporary literature? In the opening of Anne Garréta’s book Not One Day (Pas un Jour), published in 2001 but only now available in English, she reveals a deep discomfort with the growing fascination with self-narration. “All we seem to do nowadays,” she writes, “is tell and retell stories of our lives. For over a century, we’ve tried to grasp ourselves from the same angle, convinced that there’s only one key to unlock the secret of our subjectivity: desire.” But despite her reservations, Garréta finds herself drawn, perhaps perversely, to the confessional, to “play at a very old game that has become the hobbyhorse of a modernity balking at radical disenchantment: confession, or how to scrape the bottoms of mirrors.” Her own confessional, she decides, will be a playful one, in which the subject is never quite revealed, in which desire is never straightforwardly displayed.
  Long associated with the Oulipo (she became a member in 2000), Garréta’s work contains strong formalist elements: foregrounded constraints and literary gamesmanship. Thus, she approaches the confession through a series of formal rules. Every day she will sit down at the computer and write for five hours, uninterrupted and unedited: “aiming to recount the memory . . . of one woman or another whom you have desired or who has desired you. That will be the narrative: the unwinding of memory in the strict framework of a given moment.” Then, when she is finished, she will arrange the women alphabetically, by initial. (The association with a bestiary, in all its cool zoology.)
  There is nothing new about filtering the confessional subject through a formalist framework. The most famous Oulipan, Georges Perec, was well-known for placing his own autobiography as a child orphaned by the Holocaust into constrained projects like W, or a Memory of Childhood or Species of Spaces. But if Garréta is after something similar, there is deep ambivalence about the project. For Perec, the construction of an identity was a collection of fragments, a kind of resistance to obliteration — whereas, as Garréta sees it, our age is oversaturated with confession, and her participation is disenchanted, half-ironic. “Perhaps you will finally manage,” she writes, “in some feeble way, to emulate your peers, who recount their every experience, spewing out volumes of life matter — and buy into it.” The challenge she sets out for herself is to re-configure the confessional; to narrate the subject without quite believing in it: a challenge she links to the challenge of living and loving well — since, in Garréta’s mind, text and life are not fundamentally different. As she writes at the end of the opening, “. . . life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don’t love.” If one must confess, they should do so intelligently. They must interrogate their own confession.
  This conflict between confession and textual interrogation organizes the book, and provides its intellectual torque. Though Garréta presents her fragments as “the unwinding of memory,” they read more like discursive but nevertheless highly structured essays: meditations on particular kinds of desire, or philosophical investigations of how such desires might construct (or be constructed by) society. In the essay “B*,” she describes what attracts her to a particular woman as a “sensual proclivity for analysis,” a phrase which might define the book itself, though the exact arrangement of the words differs from fragment to fragment. In some, the reader is immersed in memory and sensual detail. In others, analysis predominates, both out of the necessity of complicating (and queering) what might otherwise be overdetermined narratives of subject and object, and also because Garréta has an innate tendency towards detachment. “You have a tendency to fade out of the world,” she writes, “the world in which we supposedly live.” The catalogue of desire is a way of re-establishing this connection, if only at a certain remove, in writing.
  The analytic aspect of Garréta’s writing is apt and incisive. Her essayistic style is complex but lucid and, for the most part, direct. She is particularly sharp about the societal structure of desire, especially queer desire, as in this passage from “D*,” in which she and an ostensibly straight woman perform a secret seduction within a predominately hetero dinner party:
  You both stand amidst a crowd and, from afar, through a phosphorescence of the gaze, of the body, receive the sign addressed to you and perceptible to you alone. You are thereby excepted from the general blindness. Exaltation of a lucidity that seems denied to mere mortals, to mere heterosexuals whose official relaxing of morals (which has not been accompanied by any dismantling of the old privileges and reflexes) has — to hear them complain, as their religion is somewhat comical, oscillating as it does between triumphant dogma and doleful creed — radically disenchanted desire. You are the only ones to see the desire that is not allowed, in what is not said aloud.
  In this passage are echoes of the long and fertile French tradition of cultural criticism, with its emphasis on social structure and its languages of signs, as well as a particularly French irony towards the employment of these symbols. Garréta moves easily between cultural and personal registers; her entanglement with D* quickly becomes an opportunity to explore why she is excited by “the semiotics and hermeneutics, so singular, that stem from situations of secrecy that homosexuality may involve,” and why she so often seeks out ostensibly straight women, “who, for the most part, profess the dominant religion — probably, she suggests, because this secret communication is therefore stronger. In these essayistic sections, the objects of Garréta’s desire are often rendered primarily as opportunities to taxonomize different flavors of seduction and repulsion — what she refers to as her “Flaubertian tendency.”
  The reference to Flaubert is not tangential. Although Garréta’s topics are contemporary, her references are often quite traditional, and her tone (and general attitude toward desire) has some surprising commonalities with 18th and 19th century French literary icons, all of them male. Not only does she render her project in reference to the preface to Rousseau’s Helene — “I have seen the mores of my times, and I have published these stories . . .  would that I had lived in an age when I should have thrown them into the fire!” — and Stendhal’s own autobiography, which he wrote through the heteronym of Henri Brulard, but her lingering disgust towards the mechanisms of human connection reflects the curdled realism of Flaubert and the Goncourt Brothers. “Literature,” Garréta writes: “your last line of defense against the fierce disgust the human species tends to evoke in you.”
  Sometimes, as in “D*,” this disgust has to do with the obligations of sex, its playacting, its enforced terms:
  It was imperative, at risk of disappointing her, that you fuck her standing up in the hallway; in danger of endangering her pride, that you ravish her on the kitchen table; at risk of being accused of despising her, that you screw her thrown over the ottoman cushions in the parlor; for fear of making her no longer feel desirable, that you sodomize her in the bed of the guest room; to prove your passion, that you make her come on the four-poster bed; and to make sure that no piece of furniture had been neglected, that you finger her against the piano.
  Unlike, say, the Goncourt Brothers (for whom sex carried the constant fear of venereal disease, and who once compared a prostitute to a pinned spider) Garréta is not disgusted by sex, per se. What she objects to is the way in which desire is forced into clichéd roles: the way that D*, in demanding Garréta degrade her, replicates the boring forms of a typical heterosexual relationship — and how, in relating it, Garréta is forced to render it as a grotesque parody of desire. “Just as narrative fiction is formally indistinguishable from referential narrative,” she writes, “(for they mimic each other to such a point that in these twin mirrors only mirages can be glimpsed), the description of pornographic, solipsistic alienation is indistinguishable from that of the perfect shared erotic passion.” No wonder Garréta is so deeply concerned with the aesthetics of narrative. If we do not pay scrupulous attention to our actions, in both literature and life, we risk reducing ourselves to clichés.
  The trouble, for Garréta, is that her structural understanding of the world — in which the only escape from such clichés is a highly refined aestheticism built around careful, formal decisions — risks reducing existence to nothing but an interplay of personal aesthetics. For all the book’s wit, intellectual heft, and incisive attitude towards a certain form of cerebral attraction, by the end one begins to detect a certain narrowness of scope. Most of these fragments take place within the cosmopolitan world of the international academy, in which highly intelligent people take the measure of one another, thrust and parry. This uniformity of setting (so many hotel bars, so many lingering sips of cognac), combined with a tendency towards quoting the French classics, creates an atmosphere of refined exhaustion, as if we were surveying the remnants of a party that has gone on a little long. Perhaps the party is literature itself. Referencing Balzac, Garréta writes: “there is no career in all of Paris that was not ghostwritten by the creatures of the Comedy.” Or perhaps the party is the more refined wing of Western civilization. “Did you know that the society in which you were (sometimes) living was still a court society,” she writes. “And that the Ancien Régime had never ended? Multiplied, displaced and diffracted, it reigned more supremely than ever.” This sense of exhaustion has something to do with Garréta’s disgust about sexuality, the proscribed cultural nature of desire:
  [C]an there ever be a love story without a plot? We cannot lead a worldly life without getting caught in the web, trapped in the weave of its design. And when we think we have radically managed to escape it — in the frenzy of desire — it resurrects its laws, its comedy, its control. Our desires are overblown — theatrically and vulgarly: dictated and stolen.
  Sometimes Garréta’s literary obsessions begin to feel similarly overdetermined. When she requests a novel from the writer E* (in order, at least partially, to seduce her) she compares it to a car, as if she were a kind of literary mechanic. “You informed your novelist that her vehicle was well made, its mechanics solid. That, judging by ear, everything ran smoothly, the music of the motor was pleasant, the carburetor well tuned.” Garréta admits that this form of reductive structural analysis is habitual to her, that she can “scan a 200 page volume . . . in thirty minutes and retain enough to talk about it,” because — extending the already labored automotive metaphor — “we encounter more family sedans on the roads of literature than Ferraris or prototypes.” And later, when she actually moves to seduce E*, Garréta is disgusted by the way life seems to imitate a bad novel, a bad car: “You’d think it was a parody. And you the willing character. You have taken a seat in a driving school two-cylinder, with two steering wheels, two sets of pedals. The gears shift with terrible scrapings, reverse is barely distinguishable from fourth, the suspension is abominable, and the landscape goes by slowly. The other driver pumps the accelerator and the brakes with both feet at the same time. What a ride.” Though Garréta herself is astonished by her “cruelty and vain anxiety” during this episode, what comes across most strongly is Garréta’s constant and reflexive assessment of the stale forms in literature and life, and her distrust of everyone implicated in these forms. As Garréta says of a colleague, Y*, who she was once attracted to; “Are these the moments when her guard is down, the moments when the former persona of Y* surges from under the hard armor of frivolities, strategies, and courtship rituals? Or else are they also inauthentic, another ruse or habit, a ritual behavior, a tactic of these milieus: the affectation of profundity, the exhibition of a sincerity destined to reassure us, all of us, that we are still very human and not the grotesque automata of a stock plot?” This criticism could just as easily be applied to Garréta herself, who, despite her incisive analysis, is no freer from the restrictions of these cultural conventions than her lovers.
  In the most satisfying parts of the book, however, Garreta is searching for something beyond the masks of a court culture: some moment of pure immanence, in which subject and object, if not quite united, at least vibrate together. But these moments are fraught, threatened by Garréta’s cynicism and the limiting force of social constriction. Perhaps the most beautiful example comes when Garréta takes a trip with a colleague and her step-daughter, during which the ten-year-old girl develops a fascination with her. At the end of the fragment, the girl stands behind Garréta at dinner, and the scene is rendered directly and vividly. Here, the sensual aspect of her “sensual proclivity for analysis” comes to the fore, and the result is much closer to Garréta’s stated intent of “the unwinding of memory” than her more analytic encounters:
  She has placed her forearm or her hand on your shoulder, as if to dance. The memory is of silence and stillness, of the weight of this child’s arm on your left shoulder, of her sad eyes fixed on yours, of an infinite duration. But you also know that she spoke to you. You also know that behind your head, where the table is, where the light is coming from, also comes an ugly wave of whisperings and looks that you can’t see but that tug at your gaze, which you strive not to turn away from the child who is speaking to you, so seriously, with a determination interspersed with silences, without seeming to pay attention to that which you do not see, behind your head, but that she can’t avoid encompassing in her field of vision.
  Garréta must struggle to engage with the girl, not to turn around and address the “ugly wave of whisperings” — probably from people concerned with the nascent desire contained in the relationship.
  When the dialogue is over, the girl’s stepmother breaks in to analyze the scene. She suggests that the girl has ”awaited prince charming, and [has] mistaken [Garréta] — grotesque error — for him.” What was a complex, ambiguous interaction between two people who are aware but not quite in control of the connection between them becomes, from the perspective of a cynical member of Garréta’s “court society,” nothing but a grotesque, a laughable perversion. In moments like these we see why Garréta rails against reductive narratives: not out of some high-minded intellectual snobbery, but from a deeply-held anger at how these narratives constrain and distort moments of true connection.
  Garréta finishes her book with an extended, erudite invective against the universality of the confessional narrative: “the publicity of desire,” the “pornocracy,” the “orgy of pen pushers devoutly pimping their own asses.” (In moments like these, the reader is indebted to Emma Ramadan, who has rendered Garréta in English both playful and clear.) In the end, her own ambivalence about the project threatens to overwhelm her. She worries that in abiding by the “style of the day” she has been practicing collaboration, “spreading the propaganda, like an epidemic infecting every corner of our post-modern Western world, just as those who denounce its evils enhance the idol’s aura[.]” There seems to be no way out, textual or otherwise; any attempt at criticism is immediately co-opted by the “empire of desire”: “[t]he torments of doubt, the falterings of impotence, a flaunting of anticlericalism . . . none of this, nor heresy, moreover, nor any schismatic move, will ever carry any consequence. It’s the least that the empire of desire can expect from its subjects, the very condition of their sincere worship.” The only responsible pose, it seems, is ironic detachment, for “irony alone is damning,” but even this will not save you from Garréta’s bitter final prophecy, uniting body and text; “The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.” No amount of irony and aesthetic precision can mark out a safe space for art and desire within this nightmare vision.
  Thankfully, at its best the book provides moments of escape from this “empire of desire,” in which both the text and the characters within it experience the erotic outside of familiar scripts. Of particular interest is Garréta’s experience in a women’s self-defense class, in which she knows one woman (but not which woman) is attracted to her. The combination of violence and gentleness these women offer each other, and the sensual display the class affords them, profoundly affects Garréta, and leads to one of the book’s most satisfying passages:
  You never discovered who the unknown woman was. No declaration of her desire was ever addressed to you. No certain sign. You are grateful to her for that. The mystery of her identity, the search for signs, the hermeneutic passion it inspired in you, made that semester of self-defense the most arousing erotic experience of your life. An eroticism that was all the more strange since it never managed to fasten itself or settle on any one body, but instead was bound to all of them, and because it was fluid, vacillating, drove you to pay to each of them an intense and infinite attention. The exercise, a delicate and secret asceticism to guess the enigmatic desire of the other, utterly enchanted the body. Your own, all of yours.
  These last two sentences seem like a fitting description of the best parts of Garréta’s project, when erotic life presents itself outside the stale plots and tired metaphors of court intrigue, in moments of immanence and recognition.
  Sam Allingham‘s first collection of short fiction, The Great American Songbook, is published by A Strange Object. He lives in Philadelphia.

• Lambda Literary
  https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/memoir/05/23/not-one-day-by-anne-garreta/
  Word count: 878

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Garréta relishes a queer exchange of desire that is ‘outside the law of normative codes and public languages,’”
  ‘Not One Day’ by Anne Garréta
  Review by Liz von Klemperer
  May 23, 2017

  “What’s to be done with our inclinations?” asks Anne Garréta in the first sentence of her newest book, Not One Day. The text that ensues is an exploration and interrogation of her desires, as Garréta intends to type an unedited account of past romantic encounters for five hours a day over the course of a month. Although the book swerves briefly into the erotic, the majority of the text is a heady meditation. Where we expect to find a confession of the body, we are in fact met with a confession of the mind, as Garréta laments the imposition of hetero normative gender roles upon queer desire. This leaves the reader with another question: how can we invent alternate ways to express desire outside of hetero dichotomy?
  Not One Day is just as slim as Garréta’s Sphinx, a genderless love story nominated for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize. In keeping with the Oulipo tradition, both works are marked by restraint. Where Sphinx masterfully sidesteps gender pronouns, Garréta now sets parameters for her writing process. In the Ante Scriptum she informs the reader of a rather clinical set of boundaries, describing herself as “the archivist” of her desires, putting them down “neutrally. “Garréta sets herself up to become immersed and subsequently forced to move on with a new fixation each day. It’s a calculated, punishing way of approaching the topic of longing and it’s fulfillment. Garréta’s parameters ironically bar her from constraint, as she writes mechanically, without looking back or editing her work. Garréta describes this process as painful, as she admits in the Post Scriptum that she did not ultimately follow her initial regulations, saying, “what should have been a month’s work was disseminated over more than a year.” The end result is 12 vignettes, each headed by a letter and asterisk to signify the anonymous subject. Despite her earnest attempts at intellectualization, desire is too unruly to be neatly categorized.
  Much Garréta’s discomfort stems from her distain for pre-prescribed gender norms. This discomfort peaks in Garréta’s vignette about E*, who she meets at a conference.  E* embodies the traditional femme role and assumes the more masculine presenting Garréta will adopt the role of male pursuer. While traversing the hotel to arrive at E*s room in middle of night, instead of reveling in the imminent fulfillment of her desire, Garréta reflects that, “it’s all so strange and familiar, and a bit tiring, to play this game; to play it again and always according to the standard though implicit rules leaves so little to surprise. Who dare to invent others? To thwart.” Garréta goes on to say that she feels like a “willing character,” playing in a tired, clichéd film.
  The notion of desire as an act reemerges in vignette about H*, a trans woman who Garréta meets while DJing at a club. When Garréta invites H* up to the DJ booth, the reader is primed for another scene ripe with romantic intrigue. Instead Garréta focuses on the ways in which their flirtation has been scripted to follow gender norms. Garréta refers to H* as a “femme fatale” character, and Garréta’s “stage directions would indicate something like: the hero (gentleman, thug, or young Professor Unrat) lights the heroine’s cigarette.” Garréta continues to refer to their exchange as an act as she remixes tracks that include “the phrases of old dramas, old romantic comedies.” The reader senses her boredom and detachment. Although their gender presentation is non-normative, they find themselves enacting standard tropes.
  Garréta relishes a queer exchange of desire that is “outside the law of normative codes and public languages. ” She takes pleasure in her exchange with D* at a party, as their glances are imperceptible to the “mere heterosexuals” whose desire is “radically disenchanted.” Although they are at a party, they are free from stifling norms. They are free to explore the “radical unknown of desire, the art of its emergence,” as opposed to abiding by “some elementary equations and codified protocols.” There is liberation in not being held to normative standards of interaction.
  In the books conclusion, Garréta reveals that one vignette is fiction, despite her initial promise of non-fiction. The final catch? She will not tell us which section is the fiction! The reader is left to wonder: which vignette is the outlier?Does it matter? Garréta’s desire for queer love outside of hetero social norms aligns with the ultimate philosophy behind the creation of her book. Not One Day refuses to follow the rules it’s been assigned. Just as Garréta revels in “the situations of secrecy homosexuality may involve,” she gleefully obscures the mechanics of her own creation.
   
  Not One Day
  Anne Garréta (Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan)
  Deep Vellum
  Paperback, 9781941920541 pp.
  May 2017

• Arts Fuse
  http://artsfuse.org/130855/fuse-book-review-anne-garretas-sphinx-a-compelling-story-of-genderless-love/
  Word count: 2063

  Quoted in Sidelights: Garréta’s exploit … enables her to emphasize the phenomenology of friendship, amorous attraction, and erotic desire<” remarked John Taylor on the Arts Fuse Web site. Her “original focus,” he added, “jolts the reader into looking afresh at the realities of mutual fascination, bonding, and attachment.” He saw some inconsistencies in the narrative but also “several moving passages,” and concluded that Garreta “mostly avoids the trap of being overly didactic.” Jul 15 2015   Garréta pulls off a stylistic feat: it is impossible to determine the gender of the two main characters. Is theirs a woman-woman, man-man, man-woman, or woman-man relationship? The reader must work this out—and will fail. Sphinx by Anne Garétta, translated by Emma Ramadan, Deep Vellum, 134 pp., $14.95. Anne Garréta’s Sphinx impressed French readers and critics when it was published in 1986. Recounting an increasingly amorous friendship between a French theology scholar (who is the narrator) and A***, an American nightclub dancer who works in Paris, Garréta (b. 1962) pulls off a stylistic feat: it is impossible to determine the gender of the two main characters. Is theirs a woman-woman, man-man, man-woman, or woman-man relationship? The reader must work this out — and will fail. Yet is guessing at, let alone defining, the gender of the two characters really so important? Garréta’s exploit, recalling the constraints employed by the Oulipo group (to which she was elected in 2000), enables her to emphasize the phenomenology of friendship, amorous attraction, and erotic desire. The phenomena of human interaction are sexless in this book whenever the two characters are involved, even during their sexual acts. In their midst, a few male and female characters have brief roles, and A***’s mother takes on importance, at the end, when she is dying in a hospital. But this book is essentially a dual de-gendered portrait. Garréta’s original focus jolts the reader into looking afresh at the realities of mutual fascination, bonding, and attachment. As the narrator becomes ever more sexually attracted to A***, who is initially less responsive, non-gendered attraction is thus depicted. The reader ponders what might be called the “unadulterated” contents of such attraction. To be more explicit, when a “crotch” is evoked, the reader — unless he or she projects him- or herself into the plot — must attempt to imagine sheer sexual sensation, not any purportedly “masculine” or “feminine” sensation. Think of seventeenth-century British and French philosophers discussing consciousness and sense impressions per se. These are the emotional, ideational, and sensate phenomena that Garréta attempts to isolate. The author could be described as constructing an inverted or negative image through the constraint of her storytelling: by eliminating gender from the interplay of the two characters, she implicitly argues that, in our real non-literary world, gender is socially constructed. We learn a few facts about the narrator and A***. The latter is ten years older than the former, is a half-white, half-black New Yorker, and has long been an expatriate in Paris. The narrator is a divinity student as the plot unfolds, but ends up taking a break from the university in order to work, unexpectedly and after a dramatic event, as the disc jockey of the Apocryphe Night Club. As a DJ, the bookish narrator is soon the talk of the town and, brilliantly mixing records at the club, keeps people dancing until the wee hours of the morning. As elsewhere in Sphinx, the narrator reflects philosophically on this odd job: “I would argue that a good DJ is one who, rather than simply responding to repetitive wishes that are consciously formulaic and elementary (such and such a record, such and such a song), subconsciously manages to fulfill an unknown desire by creating a unity out of something superior to adding up so many records, so many requests. To appease is not the same as to fulfill.” Garréta astutely blends such “pedantic disquisition” (as the narrator puts it self-ironically) and more graphic scenes. “I had come to the end of this chapter of my De natura rerum noctis dedicated to the essence of the position of the DJ,” the narrator notably adds to the preceding reflections, “when I noticed A*** standing near the bar, no longer accompanied by that new moronic lover, being served a glass of champagne by the barman.” Even as the scholarly DJ’s intellectual field is “apophatic”—i.e., “negative”—theology, key words such as “Apocryphe” (apocryphal) and indeed the title, Sphinx, symbolize Garréta’s questioning of what a human being is or only seems to be, of how we become what we are or what we think we are. In negative theology, God’s attributes become imaginable by ruminating about what cannot be said or imagined about God. The cogitates contemplates similarly about the self and the Other. Although the Sphinx’s famous riddle solved by Oedipus — “Which creature is four-footed in the morning, two-footed at noon, and three-footed in the evening” — does not pertain to Garréta’s plot, the (somewhat modified) English lyrics of the French singer Amanda Lear’s song “Sphinx” do: I can’t stand the pain and I keep looking for all the faces I had before the world began. I’ve only known desire and my poor soul will burn into eternal fire. And I can’t even cry, a sphinx can never cry. I wish that I could be a silent sphinx eternally. I don’t want any past only want things which cannot last. Phony words of love or painful truth, I’ve heard it all before. A conversation piece, a woman or a priest, it’s all a point of view. Garréta gropes behind the social and cultural relativism of the “point of view.” Sphinx-like enigmas are omnipresent: What is the self made of, how is it made, and who is this Other—or Others—to whom one is sometimes mysteriously drawn? Meditating on the relationship with A***, for example, the narrator wonders: “Had I confided more in A*** than in anybody else? [. . .] No, more likely I had exposed my own collapse, the ruin of the edifice I had so painfully constructed out of rhetoric and made to stand in for an identity. [. . .] I was then forced to recognize what I had always secretly wanted other to discover: ‘I’ is nothing.” The ‘I’? Like many French writers and poets over the ages, Garréta examines the foundations of the self and being. Cartesianism is rarely far away in French literature and often comes all the closer when its postulates are given a rebellious spin. The philosopher of Les Passions de l’âme and Discours de la méthode famously remarked: “I think, therefore I am.” As to Sphinx, one could venture this inverted paraphrase: “I think, and if indeed I am, I am perhaps not as I think I am.” Not surprisingly, mirrors are significant props in Sphinx. Take this key scene, during which the narrator and A*** have an argument: “I demanded to know what was wanted of me, what need I had to satisfy. [. . .] Leaving the dressing room, A***, from the door, turned back and hurled this question at me without waiting for a response: “How do you see me, anyway?” [. . .] My gaze fell upon a large mirror opposite the door, which had slammed shut after the question. I stared at the door’s reflection. A response came to my lips, which I murmured pensively in the silence: “I see you in a mirror.” In the nightclub dressing room as elsewhere in the novel, non-gendered means neither abstract or disincarnated. The issue of gender is, in fact, never raised as such; it is only implicitly articulated through the de-gendered stylistic conceit. Garréta’s writing is precise as far are objects and streets of Paris and New York are concerned. It is ideas, emotions, and sensations that she refines, stripping them of their feminine or masculine envelopes so that we may better observe their crystalline essence. The de-gendering constraint therefore functions as a sort of distilling process. The literary equilibrium that Garréta maintains between the real daily world, where the narrator is a scholar-DJ and A*** a nightclub dancer, and the idealized world of their genderless affection, gives Sphinx its depth and reveals its artifice. By removing gender from language, the author forges a language that stands at a remove from daily discourse as we know it; these stylistic efforts have been made in order to force us to scrutinize the ways we perceive each other in new ways. The novelist offers insights into amorous friendship (amitié amoureuse), a form of bonding in which establishing a “couple” is much less envisioned — even though the two characters in Sphinx end up living together — than developing an open-ended, non-exclusive intense intimacy from which sensuality is by no means excluded. Anne Garétta — like many French writers and poets over the ages, she examines the foundations of the self and being. Photo: Isabelle Boccon-Gibod. Garréta pinpoints the pleasures and frustrations of such an arrangement. One of the peculiarities of the relationship is divulged when the narrator avows: “I wasn’t particularly enthralled by the originality of A***’s views, or by a similarity in our tastes; we neither combated nor conversed. Our time together and our conversation were simply a pleasure, like the contemplation of A***’s body or A***’s dance, an aesthetic pleasure that I could attribute to a lightness of being that never dipped into inanity.” Yet issues of trust, possessiveness, and responsibility inevitably arise, especially in the last section, which starts to unfold just before a second dramatic incident occurs. There are at least two lapses in the storytelling. When A***, accompanied by the narrator, returns to New York to see their mother, their stroll through Harlem is conventional in events and scenery. And just after this passage, a short chapter relating a three-month trip through European cities likewise seems drafted to designate A*** and the narrator’s differences more than to disclose them more subtly through detailed scenes. Expectedly, the narrator wants to visit museums, A*** to enjoy the sea. The disparities in their whims and routines are stated, not shown. Yet there are several moving passages in the novel, notably one describing the characters’ first kiss. And the narrator’s self-analysis is often compelling. All in all, Garréta, who has invented a literary device to drive a philosophical hypothesis home, mostly avoids the trap of being overly didactic. Won’t a reader be tipped off by this review or others that the two main characters are genderless? Don’t Daniel Levin Becker’s Introduction, Emma Ramadan’s Translator’s Note, and the back cover spill the beans? Perhaps, but Garréta’s stylistic experiment has been carried out at once boldly and discreetly — it is difficult not to be lured into the story. Ramadan has done a fine job producing an English version as tantalizingly non-gendered as the original. In addition, she has worked around obstacles that are inherent to English. As she comments in her extensive Translator’s Note, “English [unlike French] has semantic gender, meaning that inanimate objects are not assigned a gender, but people and living creatures are (with exceptions) referred to either as masculine or feminine.” In other words, possessive adjectives in English create thorny technical problems for the translator of a genderless novel. If the narrator or A*** is holding a glass of champagne, it’s his glass or her glass but it can never be its glass. Ramadan alternates between four different strategies in English to solve the quandary: “using a demonstrative [pronoun], dropping the article altogether, pluralizing, or repeating A***’s name.” “In other places,” she adds, “I rewrote certain passages to avoid personal pronouns, or applied adjectives directly to the subject rather than to something possessed by the subject.” Hats off to her. She has skillfully brought this thought-provoking novel to the English-reading world, where it has long been overdue. John Taylor has recently published three translations: Georges Perros’s Paper Collage (Seagull), Philippe Jaccottet’s The Pilgrim’s Bowl (Seagull), and José-Flore Tappy’s Sheds: Collected Poems (Bitter Oleander Press). He is the author of the three-volume essay collection Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Transaction). His most recent collection of short prose is If Night is Falling (Bitter Oleander Press).

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