Overview

Everything can be exhibited: trinkets from the Second French Empire, a collection of photographs, a boudoir from beyond the grave, a heroine famous for her beauty, her extravagance and her pitiful end. Everything can be exposed: a woman for another woman... , the fear of one's own body, a way of entering a scene, the thrill of seduction, abandonment, the reassurance of objects, a ruin. Over the course of four decades, the Countess Virginia Oldoini returned to the same Paris studio to be photographed, posing in different tableaux to mark the moments of her life, real and imagined. A fascination with 'La Castiglione' led Nathalie Leger to weave together this imaginative proto-biography. Mysterious yet over-exposed, adored and despised for her beauty in equal measure, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Examining the myths around icons past and present, Leger meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography, reframing her own family history in the process.

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9781999331832

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Reviews

'In Leger'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; 'These Leger books are lush, obsessive, and self-reflective (...) Nathalie Leger's transcendent triptych of books about fallen-off-the-path female artists (...) deftly observes how we are all often absorbed into the wave of our own familial and inherited traumas, and how we might resist them.' - Nathan Scott McNamara, Los Angeles Review of Books; '[F]or Leger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Leger's extraordinary short books.' David McCooey, Sydney Review of Books; 'Highbrow but highly readable; delving deep yet luminous (...) Through artistic evocation, stream of consciousness, historical detail and personal memory, the author guides us into a world where images become masks of the real.' -ELLE (France); 'A subtle novel that explores femininity and its magic spells. Bewitching.' - Vogue Paris; 'A tour de force.' - Natasha Lehrer; 'Nathalie Leger's superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of biography itself.' -Charlie Stone, The Arts Desk; 'Leger's vigorous work consistently satisfies, with ideas crystallizing with the clarity of a photograph.' -Publishers Weekly; 'I've just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger, translated by Cecile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by Amanda Demarco. All three defy categorisation-history, essay, memoir, fiction. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works very much.' -Catherine Lacey; 'This trilogy feels more than a feminist recovery of narrative: it is a method through which the lives of women artists are reimagined and remade through the writer herself, a mode of hospitality in which lives coalesce and transform one another.' -Katie Da Cunha Lewin, The White Review; 'The word triptych, not trilogy. Because the books are not a straight line. The books scoff at straight lines, reveal how any line can look straight if you're zoomed too far in. The books are not discrete episodes, they are all one thing, they are all one project.' -Kyle Williams, Full Stop; 'With ferocity and pathos, Leger enters into a standing-with relationship with these other women only to realize she's been in touch with herself the entire time. This feels to me like the natural movement of the most revelatory art criticism-to move close to the work, to ride along then pierce the work's textured surface into its mysterious netherworld then looping back out (through innards) towards these words you hear out there in the private distance only to find them coming from your own mouth. With all of these women-Countess of Castiglione, Barbara Loden and Wanda (and Alma H Malone), and Pippa Bacca-Leger comes to know them as women who lived rich lives, artists' lives, intensely felt.' -Jay Ponteri, Essay Daily; 'The suffocating interpolations of being a woman have concealed the words of so many: Pippa Bacca, whose seemingly naive project is now bound to her rape and murder; American actor and director Barbara Loden, whose project of semi-autobiographical film Wanda details the listlessness of life for the 1970s American housewife; The Countess of Castiglione, whose hope had been to exhibit her photos at the upcoming 1900 International Exposition; and Leger's own mother, whose words 'too have been hidden away.' The triptych not only unearths the lost narratives of noted women; but more significantly the writers' reckoning with her own mother-'I never helped her, I never stood up for her'-suggests that the triptych's aim is to give voice to one woman: her mother.' -Clancey D'Isa, Chicago Review of Books; 'Now that all three books exist in English thanks to Dorothy Project and exceptional translations by Natasha Lehrer and Amanda DeMarco, it feels as if the stakes have been tripled. Though each book is a case study of a particular woman's life, the neat boundaries of these subjects aren't meant to hold. 'On the winding path of femininity,' Leger writes, 'the loose stone you stumble over is another woman.' These slippages are part of the danger and excitement of Leger's work-look long enough at another woman, and you may find yourself looking in a mirror.' -Laura Marris, On the Seawall

`A tour de force' (Natasha Lehrer). `A subtle novel that explores femininity and its magic spells. Bewitching.'(Vogue). `Highbrow but highly readable; delving deep yet luminous'(...) Through artistic evocation, stream of conciousness, historical detail and personal memory, the author guides us into a world where images become the masks of the real.'(Elle). `Tightly controlled and clear-sighted [...] `a superb study.' (La Croix). `In Nathalie Leger's magnificent text, everything is turned on its head, everything is paradox [...] L'Exposition is the fragile and dangerous attempt to reconstitue the self, to seek, in the secret of another woman - in the insane dramatisation of her silence - the very thing that eludes us within ourselves. Thus it is the ellipsis (the blanks between the fragments) that gives L'exposition its beauty and its truthfulness. A bewitching self-portrait.'(Les Inrockuptibles). `Nathalie Leger brings Castiglione back to life with grace, style and taste.' (Cultures Livres).

Author Information

Nathalie Leger was born in 1960 and is the author of four books based on her research work as a curator. Her UK debut Suite for Barbara Loden (2015) garnered intense critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, and was translated into several European languages. It is credited as being instrumental to the re-release, in American film theatres, of actress and director Barbara Loden's cult cinema-veritemasterpiece Wanda (1970).

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