WINNER OF THE PRIX ANAÏS NIN
Jeanne moves from room to room. In the anonymous hotel bedrooms of Paris - Hotel Agate, Hotel Prince Albert, Hotel Prince Monceau, Hotel Coypel, Hotel Nord & Champagne - she undresses man after man, forgetting faces, names, pleasures, thoughts, and all physical attributes but one. In her head, a palace of memories is being built, image by new image, lover by new lover.
There is no pathologizing Jeanne; she resists it. There is no way to impose a story on Jeanne; she escapes it. There is no pitying Jeanne, no lusting after Jeanne, no uncovering the secret to Jeanne; she won't allow it. Jeanne moves from room to room.
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781846276866
Number of pages: 160
Weight: 115 g
Dimensions: 196 x 130 x 10 mm
[T]ranslator Laura Francis does a fine job of capturing Leger's poise and poetry... t's a reminder of how rare it still is to have a female gaze on the aesthetic aspects of sex... Leger's writing is doing something different...cool, detached, specific... Genuinely fresh - Observer
A sustained assault on the authority of the phallus. . . Like a flickering pornographic video breaking up into pixels, [Jeanne] dissolves before us. . . In being nobody in particular, she can be anybody. . . there is a serious argument here - Sunday Times
[The Collection is a] provocative novel...creating a new kind of sex writing, in the surreal shapes and syntax of a direct yet viscous, particulate prose. . . In Laura Francis's supple translation, Leger's novel challenges, mesmerises, and impresses... it knowingly complicates its genre, offering a tantalising glimpse of a female desire unburdened by the debt of explanation...daring, direct and richly imagined - Arts Desk
Utterly brilliant. I love how Leger has taken a depersonalised perspective to open up such an intimate subject - this intrinsically erotic disparity has produced a completely fresh cliché-free kind of sex writing - Claire-Louise Bennett
With her unapologetic, searching heroine, and her refusal to answer 'why', Nina Leger opens up spaces of possibility in the reader. She draws us into a complex world of pleasure with a language as striking and sharp as the erotic imagination at play is tender, vulnerable and wild - Saskia Vogel
I revelled in Jeanne's mesmeric, nihilistic sex life. The Collection is filled with slight-of-hand sensuality. Choreographic in its treatment of the gendered gaze - Eli Goldstone
Leger's rendering of Jeanne's penile preoccupation is virtuosic and precise while also surprising, even surrealist. . .The Collection is short and focused... [Leger's] book is urgently necessary: because there are still men out there who don't understand how rare and revolutionary it is for a woman to write about what their penises look like to her. For a woman to adopt the surrealist approach, and show, for once, a man in pieces - Guardian
[A] bold, mischievous novel. . . truly fresh. . . a distinctive and evocative novel. . . A book for adventurous readers - Dublin Sunday Business Post
I am gripped by its weirdness...Jeanne's insatiable libido and darkly comic fixation on grotesque penises in The Collection defy the patriarchal archetype of female desire - frieze
This is an odd book. At first sight, it appears to be a fetishistic reflection on the male penis and it certainly is that but it is also something more to do with the way we construct reality! The story centres around... More
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