Items related to Trading Secrets (European Women Writers)
Synopsis
Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1998, this book is the work of one of France's most celebrated and interesting novelists writing at the height of her powers. It is fiction that leads readers through fascinating chambers of life where autobiography is constantly reimagined.
A darkly comic novel about four women aging less-than-gracefully, Trading Secrets takes us to an academic conference in Kansas where, in an encounter between Aurore, a French woman, and her American counterpart, Gloria, the differences between their two cultures become sharply apparent. The result is a bitingly funny portrait of painfully complex, psychologically damaged individuals, all of whom have been, in some sense, "colonized." The novel also offers an incisive picture of a French posture toward things American, from race relations to feminism to academia. As Paule Constant herself has said: "C'est un livre en miroir." The book is a mirror, both in how its characters reflect one another and in what it shows us of ourselves and our world.
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About the Author
Paule Constant is the author of seven novels, including The Governor's Daughter (Nebraska 1998), which was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt in 1994.
Betsy Wing's translations include The Governor's Daughter, Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea, and Edouard Glissant's The Fourth Century (all available from the University of Nebraska Press).
Margot Miller teaches French at the University of Maryland.
Reviews
Constant sets this bleak, angst-filled examination of love, envy, and distrust among women in Kansas after a feminist colloquium. She focuses on Gloria, the colloquium's coordinator, and her houseguests, Babette, Aurore, and Lola. Babette, who went to college with Gloria, has been deserted by her husband of many years and is suffering an identity crisis. Aurore, who grew up in Africa, is permanently scarred by childhood experiences that she attempts to exorcise with her writing. Lola, a once-famous actress, struggles to survive being physically ravaged by alcoholism. Gloria has a love-hate relationship with each woman. Aurore's Africa-set novels excite Gloria's obsession with her African American heritage so much that she tries to plagiarize Aurore's work. She resents Babette's lost self-esteem and indulgent self-denigration. Finally, caring for Lola is Gloria's attempt to redeem the former sex symbol for having pandered to male desires. Constant illuminates the dark side of feminism, where women pay lip service to ideals but at the same time ruthlessly manipulate one another in the name of sisterhood. Bonnie Johnston
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
The 1998 winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt (France's highest literary honor), this is the second of Constant's seven novels to appear in English. Fans of the earlier work, The Governor's Daughter, will find themselves in different terrain here. Set in a mythical Kansas university town, the book centers on four participants of a feminist colloquium who share a house and their lives: Lola, the alcoholic has-been actress; Babette, the Jewish Algerian exile; Aurore, the white French novelist raised in Africa; and Gloria, the black American hostess who plagiarizes Aurore's work. Bound together by different strains of loss and exile, each strives to maintain her dignity and self-worth while refusing to reveal her isolation to the others. Through extended character studies that reveal each woman's life history, Constant suggests that they may all be different aspects of an everywoman, victimized by relationships and bad choices. The feminist urge is accentuated by the impersonal names assigned to the men in their lives (e.g., the Photographer, the Stagehand). A somber but engaging work that provides keen insight into the feminist psyche. Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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