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lene_kretzsch's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
victoriae's review
5.0
Ok a French lady wrote a little book about an indie movie you’ve probably never heard of. If that sounds unappealing, don’t read this. If that sounds even slightly appealing, do read this because it’s great.
expendablemudge's review
5.0
Rating: 5* of five
My review of SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN is live today at Mel Bosworth's Small Press Book Review. Another wonderful, wonderful book published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project. The sooner you acquaint yourself with this extraordinary publishing house, the happier your brains will be.
My review of SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN is live today at Mel Bosworth's Small Press Book Review. Another wonderful, wonderful book published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project. The sooner you acquaint yourself with this extraordinary publishing house, the happier your brains will be.
daneekasghost's review
5.0
How do you describe anything? The book is a wonderful distillation that moves through lots of moments that come together very nicely. A quick, fulfilling, surprising read.
arirang's review
4.0
Valeria Luiselli's wonderful [b:Lost Children Archive|40245130|Lost Children Archive|Valeria Luiselli|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1547386427s/40245130.jpg|62525285] references many works of literature, but one reference in particular struck me:
Attentive Netflix fans also splotted the book, strategically placed, in a scene of Russian Dolls this year:
It seemed simple enough. All I had to do was write a short entry for a film encyclopedia. No need to put your heart and soul into it, the editor had said on the phone.
Nathalie Léger had been asked to write this brief entry about the film Wanda, made by Barbara Loden in 1970, her only film as a director, Loden also playing the eponymous title role.
But her heart and soul couldn't resist getting involved: the result was this short but powerful novel, essay and autofiction. The book is part a detailed scene-by-scene appreciation of the film, for example the opening:
Seen from a distance, a woman, etched against the darkness. Whether it is a woman, in fact, is hard to tell, we’re so far away. Framed by mountains of rubble, a tiny white figure, barely more than a dot against the dark expanse, slowly and steadily picks its way through this huge mass of debris: a vast, towering slag heap, intersected with great mounds of excavated rock, stony depressions, muddy tracks waiting to be ploughed up by the trucks. In a wide-angle shot, we follow this minute, ethereal figure as it makes its way intently along the forbidding horizon. At times the dust absorbs and dissolves the figure as it doggedly moves on, lit up for a moment, now just a vague smudge, now almost transparent, like a backlit hole in the picture, a blind spot on the decimated landscape. Yes, it is a woman.
but also a tribute to Loden herself and her life, and the story of Léger's investigations into the largely forgotten life of Loden and the film, as well as her own personal perspectives.
The movie, as Léger discovers in her investigations, is based on a real-life story -https://www.topic.com/the-true-crime-story-behind-a-1970-cult-feminist-film-classic - which had grabbed Loden's attention. of a woman, with little purpose in her life, trapped into a bank robbery which goes horribly wrong. In simple terms the film could be described as a anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde movie in both style and substance, and indeed the dissonance goes further than what appears on the screen.
Loden was first acclaimed as an actress for her Tony award winning performance as Maggie, a rather lightly fictionalised version of Marilyn Monroe, in a production of Arthur Miller, Monroe's ex-husband's After the Fall, at film director Elia Kazan's (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront) Repertory Company. Her understudy for the role was, the then unknown, Faye Dunaway.
Elia Kazan later wrote a novel The Arrangement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrangement_(novel)) with significant elements from his own life, and one of the characters, Gwen Hunt, borrowing various elements (some that she regarded as violations of her privacy) from Loden's life.
But when the book was turned into a film in 1969, the part of Gwen Hunt was given not to Loden, but to Faye Dunaway, off the back of her starring role in Bonnie & Clyde.
Kazan and Loden's relationship was obviously a troubled one, as he himself later documented in his autobiography, which is at times rather belittling of Loden's talents, and Léger sees strong echoes of this in Wanda in Loden's film and performance, a film she has said was based on her own experiences, as well as on the true crime story.
There is so much more to this book - watch the film then read the book.
4.5 stars
Among these I find a small white book—the galleys of a novel by Nathalie Léger called Untitled for Barbara Loden. It looks a little out of place there , squeezed and silent, so I take it out and head back to the room.That galley, which the author herself read, was the as-then-untitled English translation of Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, brilliantly translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon as Suite for Barbara Loden, and published in the UK by a new publisher Les Fugitives (http://www.lesfugitives.com/about/) founded by Manon.
..
I turn on my bedside lamp and stay up late, reading the novel by Nathalie Léger, underlining parts of sentences:
“violence, yes, but the acceptable face of violence, the kind of banal cruelty enacted within the family
"the hum of ordinary life”
“the story of a woman who has lost something important but does not know exactly what”
“a woman on the run or in hiding, concealing her pain and her refusal, putting on an act in order to break free”
I’m reading the same book in bed when the boy wakes up before sunrise the next morning. His sister and father are still asleep. I have hardly slept all night. He makes an effort to seem like he’s been awake for a long time, or like he’d never fallen asleep and we’d been having an intermittent conversation all the while. Wrenching himself up, in a loud, clear voice, he asks what I’m reading.
A French book, I whisper.
What’s it about?
Nothing, really. It’s about a woman who’s looking for something.
Looking for what?
I don’t know yet; she doesn’t know yet.
Attentive Netflix fans also splotted the book, strategically placed, in a scene of Russian Dolls this year:
It seemed simple enough. All I had to do was write a short entry for a film encyclopedia. No need to put your heart and soul into it, the editor had said on the phone.
Nathalie Léger had been asked to write this brief entry about the film Wanda, made by Barbara Loden in 1970, her only film as a director, Loden also playing the eponymous title role.
But her heart and soul couldn't resist getting involved: the result was this short but powerful novel, essay and autofiction. The book is part a detailed scene-by-scene appreciation of the film, for example the opening:
Seen from a distance, a woman, etched against the darkness. Whether it is a woman, in fact, is hard to tell, we’re so far away. Framed by mountains of rubble, a tiny white figure, barely more than a dot against the dark expanse, slowly and steadily picks its way through this huge mass of debris: a vast, towering slag heap, intersected with great mounds of excavated rock, stony depressions, muddy tracks waiting to be ploughed up by the trucks. In a wide-angle shot, we follow this minute, ethereal figure as it makes its way intently along the forbidding horizon. At times the dust absorbs and dissolves the figure as it doggedly moves on, lit up for a moment, now just a vague smudge, now almost transparent, like a backlit hole in the picture, a blind spot on the decimated landscape. Yes, it is a woman.
but also a tribute to Loden herself and her life, and the story of Léger's investigations into the largely forgotten life of Loden and the film, as well as her own personal perspectives.
The movie, as Léger discovers in her investigations, is based on a real-life story -https://www.topic.com/the-true-crime-story-behind-a-1970-cult-feminist-film-classic - which had grabbed Loden's attention. of a woman, with little purpose in her life, trapped into a bank robbery which goes horribly wrong. In simple terms the film could be described as a anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde movie in both style and substance, and indeed the dissonance goes further than what appears on the screen.
Loden was first acclaimed as an actress for her Tony award winning performance as Maggie, a rather lightly fictionalised version of Marilyn Monroe, in a production of Arthur Miller, Monroe's ex-husband's After the Fall, at film director Elia Kazan's (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront) Repertory Company. Her understudy for the role was, the then unknown, Faye Dunaway.
Elia Kazan later wrote a novel The Arrangement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrangement_(novel)) with significant elements from his own life, and one of the characters, Gwen Hunt, borrowing various elements (some that she regarded as violations of her privacy) from Loden's life.
But when the book was turned into a film in 1969, the part of Gwen Hunt was given not to Loden, but to Faye Dunaway, off the back of her starring role in Bonnie & Clyde.
Kazan and Loden's relationship was obviously a troubled one, as he himself later documented in his autobiography, which is at times rather belittling of Loden's talents, and Léger sees strong echoes of this in Wanda in Loden's film and performance, a film she has said was based on her own experiences, as well as on the true crime story.
There is so much more to this book - watch the film then read the book.
4.5 stars