#Anne Garréta

[heavenlyyshecomes]

INTERVIEWER In Not One Day, you compare it to spiderwebs—undetectable threads between people, and we can feel the tug of the threads between our bodies. I said something similar the other day to my girlfriend—I think I can feel what you’re feeling sometimes. And I’m not just imagining it. Maybe I’m reading small movements in her face, but I actually think it’s more magical than that, or more chemical. GARRÉTA But it’s also the fact that when you’re attracted to someone, everything about them becomes salient. We pass hundreds of people walking on the sidewalks of a big city, and we don’t even notice who they are, what they look like, their gestures and postures, unless we make an effort, or unless we have a kind of professional curiosity. But being in love, or being attracted, suddenly you pay attention. Suddenly everything becomes significant and you see things you’ve never seen in anybody else’s body, or aspects of walking, talking, standing. Extreme attention is paid to what we generally don’t notice. INTERVIEWER Can you compare this to any other life experience? GARRÉTA That hyperawareness? I would say it’s like being a hunter or being prey. I tend to look at it as something very archaic—it’s hunting, it’s capture. It’s deeply inscribed in the species.

States of Desire: An Interview with Anne Garréta by Sarah Gerard in The Paris Review

[sammeldeineknochen]

Der Schmerz ist die Voraussetzung des Erzählens.

Antje Rávic im Nachwort zu Anne Garréta: "Sphinx", S.178

[dare-g]

"We didn’t take him prisoner cause we hate captivity more than anything.

If to live vanquished and without glory is to die each day, to live as a captive is to teem like a dead rat in the rank moat of time."

In Concrete

[newstrawfortheoldbroom]

"N-evol" by Anne F. Garréta (2007), trans. Daniel Levin Becker, in All That Is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018 (2018), p. 208

[queerliblib]

Do you have any recommendations for a nonbinary main character who uses they/them pronouns, is gender neutral, and their AGAB is not mentioned? I can't seem to find any books fitting this, and it makes me extremely dysphoric. I don't identify with masc or fem at all, and I can't find any books with a gender neutral nonbinary MC, where their AGAB isn't mentioned or alluded to except for "I Wish You All The Best". Any NB character book I find is either trans masc or trans fem aligned and I just want to read a book about someone like me...

Hi! so this is a little tricky, because I don’t want to guarantee anything 100% without having personally read each one..

that being said! we had decent luck searching for ‘agender’ or ‘ungendered’ instead of only non-binary. here are some options!

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (99% sure it'll fit)

Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin (according to our research, "The book text never uses a gendered pronoun for Riley and never discloses Riley's gender assigned at birth")

The Heartbreak Bakery by A. R. Capetta (agender MC, no pronouns just goes by name Syd, don’t think assigned gender is ever mentioned)

Sphinx by Anne Garréta (trans. from french, does not gender the narrator, or their lover "A***”)

[emilyexecution]

Sphinx Anne Garréta

[nemosisworld]

Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais pas trouvé ; tu ne me désirerais pas si tu ne m'avais pas un jour tenu dans tes bras.

Anne F. Garréta

Ph. nocturnes photography

[yearningheart]

Passion — arbitrary, blind, and indifferent — needs only to feed off of its own intensity to achieve the paroxysm of its pleasure: its object is of no consequence, chosen arbitrarily and without discrimination.

Anne Garréta, Sphinx

[whilereadingandwalking]

Anne Garréta's Sphinx is an Oulipan novel: it is part of a French workshop that focuses on experimenting with language to find meaning and stretch what language can do (the most famous of these is a novel that never once used the letter 'E'). Garréta, and her translator Emma Ramadan, took on the challenge of constructing a book that never once uses pronouns for the protagonist or their lover. 

The experiment is powerful in its theory, proving it can be done, and challenging the arguments leveled against neutral pronoun use and the 'inability' of escaping gender in gendered languages. And the novel alongside it is one I hope to reread, a book of longing and love and grief, of a DJ enamored with a dancer. 

[womenintranslation]

Natasha Gilmore of Idlewild Books (natasha at idlewildbooks dot com) announces the next meeting of the Women in Translation Book Club:

“Hello! I'm looking forward to our next meeting, when we'll discuss Sphinx by Anne Garréta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan. Garréta is the first female invited to the Oulipo literary group in France, who are keen on writing books with experimental rules attached (a book written without a single word that contains the letter e). This novel is a love story between two characters with no reference to gender! A tricky feat en Française! Topic: Women in Translation Book Club Time: Aug 1, 2021 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)”

[heavenlyyshecomes]

How we love to exaggerate the power of desire. So resistible, so often. How many times have we truly, savagely, imperatively desired a body? Consider this question, reader, forget your heart’s outpourings, your head’s effervescence, your surges of vanity: how many times have you felt a desire that struck at your marrow? It’s an enchantment, a bewitchment. Or rather, in all likelihood you will have overestimated the strength of your reason and your will. You believe you are the master of your desires; you think you are free to succumb to them or not; even free to deliberate them. We screw up, and end up screwing.

—Anne Garréta, Not One Day tr. Emma Ramadan

[sammeldeineknochen]

Wie in einem Brutkasten brüteten wir nebeneinander unseren Schmerz aus.

Anne Garréta: "Sphinx", S.109

[dare-g]

"When we can’t piss, time doesn’t piss either. When we’ve pissed, time seems to gush. I don’t have any experiential proof, but it seems to me that, from a certain perspective, it’s as if time, real time, is not what you see on watches and clocks. And that real time, in fact, trickles. So, if God exists, he must be a prostatic and incontinent old man, and the universe is his bladder.

Or his chamber pot.

In any case, the end of time will look like a big old chaotic colonic.

Seen from that angle, life’s but a tinkle, isn’t it? Caesar or Victor, I can’t remember which, wasn’t being fuelish when he said, I came, I saw, I squatted. Punto basta."

In Concrete

[neoyorzapoteca]

States of Desire: An Interview with Anne Garréta (The Paris Review)

[nathanabhaltersmith-shelf]

[covershaven]

The Sphinx Anne Garréta Design: Anna Zylicz