Overview

Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, conveys with singular force the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother, Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette's stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love—of desire run cold—and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial 1953 publication for its boundary-pushing style, Lili Is Crying catapulted Bessette to cult status in France. The novel is moving and maddening in turns, with its characters trapped in their own cruelties and sorrows, but in its spareness and strength it feels true. ""Show me a woman who's chosen something."" Bessette's books were hailed for their unusual economy of expression, rarity, strange humor, and sheer vivacity. She characterized her new kind of novel as ""a freshly cut slice of life, whose force comes from its lack of commentary.""

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Reviews

""AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW!"" -- Raymond Queneau ""Living literature, for me, in France today—it’s Hélène Bessette."" -- Marguerite Duras ""It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere. It’s an electric storm. It started, we’re not told when—and it hasn’t ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying."" -- Kate Briggs ""Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessette’s cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. It’s also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place – a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggs’s translation is a powerful channelling of Bessette’s voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present. "" -- Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug ""Lili is Crying is not straightforwardly tragic – as the title may initially trick us into believing – but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true."" -- Saba Sam, author of Send Nudes ""This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith."" -- Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent

""AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW!"" -- Raymond Queneau ""Living literature, for me, in France today—it’s Hélène Bessette."" -- Marguerite Duras ""It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere. It’s an electric storm. It started, we’re not told when—and it hasn’t ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying."" -- Kate Briggs

AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW!--Raymond Queneau It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere. It's an electric storm. It started, we're not told when--and it hasn't ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying.--Kate Briggs Living literature, for me, in France today--it's Hélène Bessette.--Marguerite Duras

""AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW!"" -- Raymond Queneau ""Living literature, for me, in France today—it’s Hélène Bessette."" -- Marguerite Duras ""It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere. It’s an electric storm. It started, we’re not told when—and it hasn’t ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying."" -- Kate Briggs ""Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessette’s cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. It’s also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place – a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggs’s translation is a powerful channelling of Bessette’s voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present. "" -- Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug ""Lili is Crying is not straightforwardly tragic – as the title may initially trick us into believing – but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true."" -- Saba Sam, author of Send Nudes ""This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith."" -- Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent ""[Lili Is Crying] felt electric and urgent, as if Bessette should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux. Lili shares the cartoon’s casual violence, which is not to say the novel is comic, though at times it is, yes, darkly funny. It is beautiful, brutal."" -- Jennifer Kabat - 4columns ""Bessette’s prose is prickly and snappy [in this] tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter.  "" -- The Spectator

Author Information

Hélène Bessette (1918–2000) published thirteen novels with Gallimard between 1953 and 1973, won the Prix Cazes in 1954, and was twice in the running for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. After her editor Raymond Queneau’s death in 1976, her publisher ceased to support her. In 2000, she died in poverty and in poor mental health, with her body of work out of print and largely forgotten. It was only several years after her death that her singular articulation of what, with specific intent, she called “the poetic novel” found a new and avid readership in France. Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lectures and seminar notes: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. This Little Art, her genre-bending essay on the art of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. In 2021, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her debut novel, The Long Form, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023 and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.

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