I'm a psychoanalyst and a writer. I'm fascinated with the thoughts, feelings, dreams, and fantasies that make up our inner worlds, and I love how the beauty of language can reach beyond what ordinary experience seems to suggest. My novels take place in the minds of their protagonists; I look through their eyes and follow the ideas, memories, and hopes that guide their lives. I enjoy their idiosyncrasies, allow them to be weird, vulnerable, and volatile, and I think of them as lovable and in times of adversity as brave as any human being can be.
This is one of the most fascinating and beautiful books I've read.
It gently leads the reader into the lives of three protagonists (told in loosely connected stories), whose relationships start seemingly real but get increasingly confusing, enigmatic, and almost psychotic. After I read this book, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, I read all books by Marie NDiaye, and I loved them all.
Her language is original and amazing, and her characters are presented in such a caring and dignified way that the reader can empathize with and appreciate the difficult struggles of these women's disturbed and endlessly searching minds. Reading N'Diaye is an extraordinary experience. I am always waiting for her next publication.
Forty-year-old Norah leaves Paris, her family and her career as a lawyer to visit her father in Dakar. It is an uncomfortable reunion - she is asked to use her skills as a lawyer to get her brother out of prison - and ultimately the trip endangers her marriage and her relationship with her own daughter, and drives her to the very edge of madness.
Fanta, on the other hand, leaves Dakar to follow her husband Rudy to rural France. And it is through Rudy's bitter and guilt-ridden perspective that we see Fanta stagnate with boredom in this alien, narrow…
I only discovered the world-renowned author Clarice Lispector in 2015, when the excellent edition of her complete stories was published.
Her capacity for keen and idiosyncratic observation penetrates the human heart and mind and makes her tales simultaneously shocking, amusing and thought provoking. Imagine to read the story of a chicken and feel yourself being almost passionately involved in its short life! Or think of the birthday party of an 89-year-old woman, who despises her family that surrounds her in barely veiled hostility!
These stories are amazing in every way; they are rooted in a deep understanding of the human mind, and their psychological grasp is eye-opening. I find them much more accessible than Lispector's novels and enjoy rereading them from time to time.
Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don't know what to do with themselves- and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives-and hers-and ours.
This is a book like no other! With its first sentences it gripped me, and I couldn't put it down till the very end. The same happened to everybody I recommended it to.
Formally it is part of a trilogy. Its style is dry and almost merely reporting, and yet it is emotionally involving in a powerful way.
Is what we are told meant to be real? Or is it only the product of a traumatized mind trying to cope with war, poverty, pain, abuse, and the endless yearning for what is lost? Are the twins, the protagonists of this trilogy, really two separate fictional characters or rather one with a dissociated mind?
Twin brothers, left with their evil grandmother at a time when war has blurred all distinctions between good and evil, learn to steal and kill in the name of survival and create their own loveless morality
In the first sentence of this novel Anna Lore falls madly in love with a man she happens to run into on the street of her hometown.
Even though she only vaguely recognizes him as they strike up a brief conversation, she becomes so obsessed with him that she is willing to give up everything for him, including her marriage of twenty years with a loving and reliable husband who she loves too.
Reading this novel, I was fascinated with Anna Lore's struggle to understand what's driving her towards a man, who almost against his will has such irresistable power over her. To follow her thinking as it makes her crazy infatuation appear reasonable and compelling is a fascinating experience of the uncanny nature of the unconscious.
Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. "How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that's not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why…
Decades after its first publication in 1984, Duras' fictionalized autobiography is still an engrossing read.
Placed in prewar Saigon, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, the first-person narrator, lives like a stray cat in depriving circumstances with a neglectful manic-depressive mother. When a wealthy 27-year-old Chinese man seduces her into an affair, she takes refuge with him in a confusing life of soothing seclusion and melancholic sexuality.
I found this raw emotional account of an adolescent's defiant self-denigration combined with the wistful recognition of her and her lover's impossible affair as astute as it is heart-wrenching. It's a small book that will never age because of its emotional authenticity and depth.
A sensational international bestseller, and winner of Frances' coveted Prix Goncourt, 'The Lover' is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.
Saigon, 1930s: a poor young French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society.
A sensational international bestseller, 'The Lover' is disturbing, erotic, masterly and simply unforgettable.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor". Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream like state. Real or imaginary, the Hotel Castle is the place of Sine's mourning, where she remembers her late parents' stories and tries to understand the journeys of their lives. The novel unfolds in a chain of poignant, puzzling and funny scenes, as if Fellini meets Kafka, the comical with the dark side of the absurd.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
