Far from the Tree. When families are dysfunctional Saturday October 20th 2012 / McNally Jackson Bookshop
The Author
Zoom
A novelist and a philosopher, Gwenaëlle Aubry studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Trinity College in Cambridge. She published her first novel, Le diable détacheur (Actes Sud), in 1999, followed in 2002 and 2003 by L’Isolée (Stock) et L’Isolement (Stock) and Notre vie s’use en transfigurations (Actes Sud, 2007), written while in residency at the Villa Medicis in Rome. She is also the author of several nonfiction works including a translation of a treatise by Plotinus. In 2009, she won the Prix Femina for No One.
No One, translated from French by Trista Selous (Tin House Books, 2012)
Bibliography No One, translated by Trista Selous (Tin House Books, 2012) Le Moi et l’intériorité [The Inner Nature of the Self] (Dir.), with Frédérique Ildefonse (Vrin, 2009) Le (Dé)goût de la laideur [The (Dis)Taste for Ugliness] (Mercure de France, 2007) Notre vie s’use en transfigurations [Our Lives Lost in Transfigurations] (Actes Sud, 2007) Dieu sans la puissance - Dunamis et Energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin [A Powerless God – On the Concepts of Dunamis and Energeia in the Works of Aristotle and Plotinus] (Vrin, 2007) L’Isolement [Solitary Confinement] (Stock, 2003) L’Isolée [Secluded] (Stock, 2002) L’excellence de la vie - Sur L’Ethique à Nicomaque et L’Ethique à Eudème d’Aristote [Life’s Greatness – On Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics] (Ed.), with Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey (Vrin, 2002) Le Diable détacheur [The Untarnished Devil] (Actes Sud, 1999) © Stéphane Haskell/ Mercure de France
Gwenaëlle Aubry France
Cleaning up her father’s home after his death, Gwenaëlle Aubry discovered a handwritten, autobiographical manuscript with a note on the cover: “to novelize.” The title was The Melancholic Black Sheep, but the subtitle, An Inconvenient Specter, had been crossed out. The specter? Her father’s disabling bipolar disorder. Aubry had long known that she wanted to write about her father; his death, and his words, gave her the opportunity to explain his many absences — even while he was physically present — and to sculpt her memory of him. No One is a fictional memoir in dictionary form that investigates the many men behind the masks, and a unified portrait evolves. «A» describes her father’s adopted persona as Antonin Artaud, the poet/playwright; «B» is for James Bond; and, finally, «Z» is for Zelig, the Woody Allen character who could transform his appearance to that of the people around him. Letter by letter, Aubry gives shape and meaning to the father who had long disappeared from her view. The whole is a beautifully written, vivid exploration of a particular experience of mental illness and what it can reveal more generally about human experience.
Reviews “The question of identity haunts Aubry’s slim, tough novel about a Parisian lawyer suffering from bipolar disorder...virtuosic sentences and ingenious structure...the reader feels privileged to gain access to these troubled minds.” New York Times Book Review “Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Personne is a beautifully rendered and conceived work. Structured like a duet, with writing by her dead father and herself, Personne is about the search for a wanderer father in the morass of his unstable identity. It is an impassioned novel, a psychoanalytic double session, an examination of the limits of language, and an act of filial devotion.” Lynne Tillman, author of Someday This Will Be Funny “A cubist and polyphonic portrait, ridden with elegance and restraint, [No One] is a two-fold autobiography of a father and daughter, its threads are delicately woven with impressions, memories and language that recreate the figure of complex and engaging man, stranger to the world- yet, also stranger to himself…” Le Monde des Livres
An event created and organized by the Villa Gillet - 25 rue Chazière - 69004 Lyon - France Tel : 00 33 (0)4 78 27 02 48 - Fax : 00 33 (0)4 72 00 93 00 - www.villagillet.net
/ 17