Manhattan Letters from Prehistory

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, TRANSLATED BY BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC

“A luminous book. A poignant literary work.”

—ALESSIA RICCIARDI, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

“This brilliant book is above all an investigation of the power of literature, of the ways in which fiction keeps secret what it seems to expose, lies and tells the truth at the same time. Hélène Cixous infuses this haunting story of deception with her unique poetic style, incisive wit, and philosophical acumen.”

—BRIGITTE

WELTMAN-ARON, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

“A remarkable sequence of meditations on memory and identity, presence and absence, the said and the unsaid, from one of the most significant and original writers in Europe today.”

—IAN

BLYTH, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

“An affecting novel about how the heart—an organ that doesn’t just bleed, but reads and writes—is given and taken, and the scars it bears.”

—M/C REVIEWS

The luminous tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors.

Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University’s Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return.

A young European intellectual’s first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty, and a never-again-to-be-found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same.

Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous’s fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the “omnipotenceother” seductions of literature; a family’s flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS is the founder of the first Women’s Studies program in France, at the University of Paris VIII. Since 1967, she has published more than fifty “fictions,” as well as numerous works of criticism on literature and many essays on the visual arts. She has long been a collaborator with Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil, and a number of her plays have been published. Her many books include Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, and The Portable Cixous

BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC lives in Paris. She is the translator of Hélène Cixous’s Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Dream I Tell You, Reveries of the Wild Woman, and The Day I Wasn’t There and the author of a volume of poems, Against Gravity.