Suite for Barbara Loden

‘Inventive and affecting, Suite for Barbara Loden takes both the novel and biography to new and interesting places.’ — Eimear McBride, Guardian’s Best Books of the Year 

‘Léger’s writing is concerned with the value of its own creation, of its possibility to respond to what she terms elsewhere “the annihilation” of narrative through male violence.’ — The White Review 

 ‘In her combination of the conversational and the incantatory, the fragmentary and the infinite, Léger captures something of Marguerite Duras’s own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of Wanda are entirely her own.’ — New Yorker 

 ‘Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden […] is part ode to Wanda, part biography, part essay, part autofiction, and entirely honest. It led me to watch the film and the film led me to read the book again and the book led me to watch the film again and it’s been going on like that for some time now.’ — Catherine Lacey, Guardian 

‘Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything – biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front.’ — Richard Brady, New Yorker 

 ‘Brilliant little book.’ — Valeria Luiselli, Twitter post 

 ‘Léger jump-cuts through time and space with the expertise of a movie director.’ — Joanna Walsh 

 ‘An extraordinary book. It reads compulsively and is unlike anything else I have read.’ — Selma Dabbagh 

 ‘Beautifully translated.’ — David Collard, Times Literary Supplement 

 ‘This writing is made through doubt about its own capacities, and its own efficacies. But I think there is a benefit to faltering at the possibilities of expression.’ — Katie Da Cunha Lewin, The White Review 

 ‘How do you describe a person you don’t know? What constitutes their essentialness? And how do you tell their story simply? [Suite is] one of the most affecting stories I’ve read in a long time. A mix of observation, recitation, and imagination, Suite persists in the idea that no single perspective is sufficient in gaining an understanding of a person, and also, perhaps, that no accumulation of perspectives is sufficient either.’ — The Paris Review, Staff Picks 

 ‘There’s a kind of inert vividness to these descriptions, a scrim between me and the dramatic moment, that I find almost erotic. Léger intersperses descriptions of Wanda with passages about how she came to know this movie, how she tried and tried to understand Barbara Loden herself. The result of these combined fragments is delicious and mysterious.’ — Edan Lepucki, The Millions 

 ‘A desire to speak in the language of cinema is at the heart of Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden. This book plays with our conception of the ties between language, vision and the moving picture. Its structure is celluloid – a series of frames – fixed images run through with facticity – bridged by fantasy – that pan through from a real-world study of the life, times and work of the actress Barbara Loden.’ — Dominic Jaeckle, Review 31’s Best Novels of 2015 

 ‘Suite for Barbara Loden isn’t just the story of Barbara Loden: it’s the story of Nathalie Léger, and to a certain extent, the story of women everywhere. How better to preserve oneself than to be the author of one’s own vulnerability?’ — Bloom 

 ‘Insisting on looking for what isn’t there is part of Léger’s method. As she searches for truths about her subjects’ lives, she amends the archive’s gaps by introducing short flights of speculation and imagination, allowing her subjects to swell into living figures. Her writing is intellectual, self-aware, and lucid in its demonstration of this investigation-in-progress, a thinkingthrough dramatized on the page […] This is the brilliance of Léger’s project: we can look and look and see nothing of a person; we can examine them minutely, intently, and miss them completely.’ — Nicole Rudick, New York Review of Books 

 ‘In Léger’s hands, desolation can reveal a woman in all her multiplicity – in her ugliness and abasement and determined self-destruction, seemingly ground down to the nubs of her sorrow, but ultimately emerging with a strange richness, full of haunted persistence, droll knowingness, untamed desires, and hardscrabble resilience.’ — Leslie Jamison, Bookforum 

 ‘A powerful example of how summary, channelled through the most personal of perspectives, can be a form of art.’ — Christine Smallwood, Harper’s Magazine 

 ‘Léger’s extraordinary books placed me in the middle of the words ‘irreparable’ and ‘inconsolable’ – those and a few others. And the liminal space of literature that she created for me, made those words, if briefly, both more beautiful and more bearable.’ — David McCooey, Sydney Review of Books 

 ‘A miniature model of modernity.’ — Jenny McPhee, Bookslut