Now, Now, Louison
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Financial Times Book of the Year
The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen.
This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can.
Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fr mon, an art historian and gallerist, delivers an unusual, petite book that attempts to portray the inner life of artist Louise Bourgeois, whom Fr mon worked with. The text ranges loosely between the first and second person in short paragraphs that depict various sequences of Bourgeois's life, with little background information to explain who the characters are. This narrative collage includes several entries in a spider compendium; the early, traumatizing death of Bourgeois's mother; the philandering of her father, Louis; Bourgeois's overseas trip to America to get away from her family; her love of mathematics; her dietary habits in old age; the loneliness that followed the death of her husband; her playtime antics in childhood; and untranslated French song excerpts. Most intriguingly, Bourgeois acquires a studio in Brooklyn and starts producing the spider sculptures for which she became known. Throughout, Fr mon takes "great liberties with reality." There are moments of real beauty and insight, but the book too often gets lost in the web of its telling. Fans of Bourgeois will likely find themselves wanting more about her; fans of unconventional biographical portraits may wish this book dug deeper.
