Among her recent novels,Despentes remains a controversial figure in France, with many claiming that her choice of subject matter and her depictions of violence end up undermining her feminist message. The other seemingly takes pleasure in breaking down taboos but remains staunchly within dominant discourses of misogyny. The notion of goodness and indeed justice is expertly manipulated by Despentes, particularly in the character of Sister Elisabeth, whose wickedness has rarely been matched. I stopped reading the novel at the part when Nadine kills Séverine for no other reason than that she’s incredibly annoying.If there was a distinction to be made between Nadine’s attitude toward Séverine and Despentes’s own, it seemed negligible. They live between New York and France, and tweet at @akafferez.The Manipulation of Time in Salvatore Scibona’s The Volunteer,Untold Stories in Last Call on Decatur Street. Much of this reputation rests on her first novel,But it wasn’t the violence or the graphic sex that stopped me from reading her work. “That’s exactly what I’m writing about right now.”.Visit our store to buy archival issues of the magazine, prints, T-shirts, and accessories.This site was created in collaboration with. I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. Take the novel (which she later turned into a film) that propelled her into the public eye:Writing within the confines of what’s socially acceptable is of little interest to Despentes; her descriptions of all kinds of marginalized populations are unflinching and relentless, allowing her to expose and skewer the various hypocrisies of the French late-capitalist bourgeoisie with delusions of ethical grandeur. I’ve translated it for you. Yet I am fifty years old, and I have seen governments. Virginie Despentes (French: ; born 13 June 1969) is a French writer, novelist, and filmmaker.Her work is an inventory of youth marginalization; it pertains to the sexual revolution lived by Generation X and to the acclimation of pornography in public spaces through new communication techniques. In.Her personality is composed of … a series of cultural references that she wears the way she does her accessories: according to whatever is in fashion, with a real talent for resembling any other girl on the street.She keeps up her personality like her bikini line, because she knows she has to pull out all the stops to get a guy to fall for her. What must be admired about Despentes is her fearless approach to feminism and womanhood. It seems appropriate to start this blog with a review of anything by Virginie Despentes. The journey to find Valentine, a beautifully tragic girl with mayhem on her mind, takes Lucie from Paris to Barcelona and back again, all the while accompanied by the Hyena, a tough, street smart hellion with sex, drugs and trouble never far behind.It seems appropriate to start this blog with a review of anything by Virginie Despentes. Tag: Virginie Despentes Spotlight | Staging France: Beyond Words Festival of French Literature, London SW7. As a strong feminist, her work appeals to me greatly and her ability to write about women and sex, death and morality is always breath taking. There’s violence, heaps of it, but it’s never mere spectacle. Despentes’ great strength is in producing well rounded, vivid characters and, despite the often extreme events faced by the main protagonists here, they are intensely relatable. For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. I felt too much empathy for this girl to mock her. Her fierce acceptance of her sexuality, lifestyle and actions makes her a worthwhile heroine, albeit a very human and flawed one which is always Despentes style. Cafés, books and debate are a mainstay of French culture in a uniquely seductive way, so to savour some French flair, head to the Institut français in London this week for the second Beyond Words Festival. Despentes sums up the collapse of the marriage simply: A friend who’s currently reading the first volume of,“Funny you should say that,” I wrote back. The interesting questions raised by Apocalypse Baby encourage the reader not only to reflect on the nature of good and evil but also question their own stance on what is right and just in a world often driven by selfish, dangerous impulses.This book will likely not appeal to everyone, however if you are looking for a fast-paced rollercoaster ride of sex, self-discovery and badass feminist expression then look no further!For those interested in reading more by Virginie Despentes, you could try the infamous Baise-Moi. Photo: Jean-François Paga.For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. That is where my problems with Despentes’s work originated, and I’m not sure they’ve been entirely resolved by.The film, like the book, leaves this question open.Apart from the bleak realities of its protagonists’ lives, the world of.Adapting the artificial world of the novel to the screen, Despentes and Trinh Thi commit to a gritty reality that comes through on a technical, formal level—the film was made for next to nothing, and so it looks like something you’d watch late at night on home-access television—as well as through the decision to include real, unsimulated sex acts, even in the rape scene. For the former, “feminism” is still an icky word; the latter sometimes seems to embrace it but mostly revels in the supposed libertine heritage of the Marquis de Sade and Co., without actually dismantling anything.Despentes will have none of that. She was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for Vernon Subutex 1 in 2018. This is my gun. In Valentine, it is possible to remember the feelings of uncertainty, the exhausting process of change and the burden and delight of burgeoning sexuality experienced by teenage girls on the brink of adulthood. Despentes is a legend in France, especially … / This one’s for fighting. In France we are not racist, but I do not remember ever having seen a black government minister. I put down,“This is my rifle. The book reads as if Despentes had a personal score to settle with some phantom woman offstage. Forty writers, translators, actors, musicians and journalists are … Lucie reminds us of the conflict we all feel at times about our place in the world, the direction of our life and even the development of our own individual carnality. She does not shy from describing how being gang raped as a young adult hitchhiking across France affected her: it does not define her, but it did influence her way of thinking about class, gender, and sexuality. Virginie Despentes is a writer and filmmaker. I felt that like Brontë, Despentes’s “anger was tampering with [her] integrity,” that she had “left her story to attend to some personal grievance.” Despentes seemed to be lashing out at women who were too weak or dumb to interrogate their complacent embrace of late-capitalist femininity, instead of at the system that created and sustained it.This spiky, unreconstructed anger reminded me of the kind of thing that repelled me from Kathy Acker’s work as well. Virginie Despentes is an award-winning author and filmmaker, and a noted French feminist and cultural critic. £10.99. As a strong feminist, her work appeals to me greatly and her ability to write about women and sex, death and morality is always breath taking. Sign up to our … I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. Virginie Despentes is a bit of a UFO in the French literary landscape: born in 1969, she’s worked as a writer, filmmaker, sex worker, journalist, and sales clerk, among other things. Virginie Despentes is a French writer. It felt to me like Acker and Despentes were jutting out their chins trying to prove they could produce work that was as ugly and aggressive as a man’s, in a bid to be taken more seriously and to prove how edgy they were (and, by extension, how much edgier they were than these other women, who sleepwalked through the patriarchy). The sex is real, and the violence is fake, but there is another kind of violence being represented, which isn’t fake at all. Although many of the friendships are underpinned by desire, disillusion and envy resulting in back-biting and betrayal, the characters are touching and convincing, one way or another. Virginie Despentes is a caustic, funny, shrewd observer. I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. What’s so striking about her, especially within the context of the French cultural landscape, is that she’s blunt, upfront, and unapologetic about upending normative rules of decorum regarding what can be discussed and how it must be discussed. In France we are … Afferez is a queer writer/grad student, & big fan of pseudonyms. She is the author of fifteen books including Apocalypse Baby (2010) and the Vernon Subutex trilogy (2013-2017). Both seemed bent on writing into a masculinist tradition that I viscerally rejected—Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Michel Houellebecq. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself.Despentes is a legend in France, especially among young women. blog; Authors > Virginie Despentes; Virginie Despentes. You could also try Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, a filthy entertaining romp through the anatomy of the main protagonist, haemorrhoids and all, although be warned it may change the way you look at avocados forever….Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. I thought of them as Michelle Houllebecquettes. This time, it’s a trio of thick nineteenth-century-style novels called,Despentes also writes about the men who fall foul of the demands of masculinity, those “who don’t know how to fight, those who cry easily, those who aren’t ambitious, competitive, well-hung, or aggressive, men who are fearful, timid, vulnerable … too poor to be attractive, men who’d like to be fucked, men who don’t want to be counted on, men who are scared to be alone at night.” She is pointing out that we are,“Rape Me” (Grove Atlantic’s parenthetical subtitle for its English edition—still not quite right, but the Nirvana reference is appropriate, as there are Hole lyrics scattered throughout the book),“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” —Jean-Luc Godard,We are so unused to women being the agents of violence that it surprises us when we encounter it, in news stories, in film, in fiction. They mess … When we first meet Séverine, she is complaining that she can’t believe a guy would fuck her and not call her again; she likes to repeat that she is “not that kind of girl.” She spouts a vision of heterosexual relations straight out of.There was an anger and a sarcasm in the writing that I turned away from. Indeed, it’s possible to view the three women as being, perhaps uncomfortably, representative of many a reader’s journey into womanhood. Throughout her work, she counters two dominant tendencies in contemporary French letters when it comes to gender and sexuality. She is the award of many award-winning books, including King Kong Theory, Apocalypse Baby (winner of the 2010 Prix Renaudot), and Vernon Subutex (winner of the Anaïs-Nin Prize 2015, Prix Landerneau 2015, Prix La Coupole 2015). King Kong Theory. With a transgressive exploration of obscenity's limits, as a novelist or a film-maker … One strays from political issues, embeds any talk of sexuality into Catholic shame and guilt, and prudishly remains within “safe” ideological bounds. Virginie Despentes. Despentes seemed content to judge Séverine superficially, and it felt to me like a betrayal of the novelist’s task to render some human truth on the page. ), centres on three women- a teenage runaway, the private investigator charged with finding her and the mysterious Hyena, an enigmatic woman with a past shrouded in mystery. She is never afraid to be ugly, crude or violent … I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. Early on in my education as a critic, I absorbed Virginia Woolf’s critique of Charlotte Brontë, who wrote in a rage where she should have written calmly. It’s that her work foregrounds an irrational violence that is at odds with our entrenched ideas about femininity. In the Hyena, we see flashes of the woman I certainly aspired to be growing up, strong and capable with a take no shit attitude. And the pleasure isn’t fake either; it’s intrinsic.This is perhaps a (nonviolent) way out of the double bind of,Despentes continues to inspire controversy with her work. “Girls are never, never taught to be violent,” Despentes tells,“Makes Thelma and Louise look like a Merchant-Ivory film”,“Makes Thelma and Louise look like a lighthearted Disney movie”,“Thelma and Louise with actual penetration”,“Thelma and Louise without Hollywood sentiment”,It’s not that Despentes thinks women should be more violent in real life (though come to think of it, she might). Alongside the themes of transition and sexuality which feature heavily here, there is also the concept of morality, which Despentes plays with to great effect. Pornography and prostitution feature prominently in her writings and films, but they are wrested away from the male gaze that has so thoroughly defined them for the past centuries in the French mainstream culture. I read that and felt uncomfortably seen; this is more or less the girl I was encouraged to be by the middle-class suburban milieu that produced me. She is never afraid to be ugly, crude or violent in her description of the experiences of women and for this she should be applauded. But her “.A.K. Despentes sums up these various lives throughout Vernon Subutex 1, a rich cast-of-character sequence of descriptions. What must be admired about Despentes is her fearless approach to feminism and womanhood. This one’s for fun.”,In the past few years, everyone here in Paris has been reading Despentes again. Whilst her work may be considered shocking by some, for me it is brave and funny and deliciously depraved.The story itself moves at breakneck pace and there is a sense of tragic inevitability about the outcome for Valentine, although, without giving too much away, Despentes has produced a finale which will undoubtedly jolt the reader into a nightmare of chaos and alarm. In this open letter, read aloud over the radio, she denounces the denial of racism and explains why “being white” constitutes a privilege. Virginie Despentes. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself. With the ultimate goal being: become someone’s wife.Ouch. Patrice's sorry tale is typical, as he understands quite well what he was doing in the relationship but just couldn't change his ways. Frank Wynne has translated her audacious, fearless novel beautifully with an insider’s ear for subtle linguistic nuances and slang. Apocalypse Baby, described as ‘part thriller, part road movie, part romance’ (I mean, seriously, what more could you want?
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