By Ephrat Livni Even with the right skills, few artists can make a career from a dream. Getting recognition for abilities is an uphill battle, and the luckiest—those who gain a lifetime of international success—tend to only be remembered for a single thing after death. This will likely be the bittersweet fate of the very lucky Hubert de Givenchy, a fashion designer and French aristocrat whose ideas may have influenced your outfit today. The iconic designer died on March 10 at age 91, after rising to worldwide fame in the 1950s and 1960s and contributing to his still-thriving house until 2014. Givenchy’s early and later work remains contemporary. In fact, we have him to thank for fashion separates—that is, the now very common idea that a woman’s wardrobe can be modular, comprised of complementary parts that all fit together into different looks instead of complete outfits. But we’ll remember him for one dress worn by a single unforgettable actress that’s actually a nod to another designer, Coco Chanel, creator of the Little Black Dress—or LBD. Audrey Hepburn wore a long, simple black sheath dress with a slit up one side, and long black gloves, in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Givenchy designed the dress, and many of Hepburn’s subsequent looks on film and in life—as well as pieces for Jackie Kennedy and Grace Kelly. Coco Chanel may have originated the Little Black Dress, but it was Givenchy, thanks to Hepburn’s both louche and devastatingly sharp inhabitation of an albeit-elongated version of the garment in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that made it iconic,” writes Tim Teeman in a Variety piece titled “Givenchy’s Brilliance was More than just Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The writer’s concern is that Givenchy’s many other sartorial contributions will be forgotten because of one woman in a single cinema sensation—which would still put Givenchy’s reputation in an enviable state. This designer’s fate is no different than that of other artistic greats who innovate for decades but are mostly known for only one work. Take Andy Warhol’s classic Campbell Soup can paintings, for example. Warhol didn’t just do screen prints of items that could be found in a supermarket, although those are the paintings we best recall. He also transformed the art world with the concept of superficial works that were sneakily substantive for their comment on the culture. Equally key, he also spawned a generation of artists in many genres by creating The Factory for artistic experimentation and production. And because of him, we people of the future, all expect at least 15 minutes of fame--although some now dispute the claim Warhol famously said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” (a challenge that itself proves the point little endures). Similarly, literary history is riddled with major contributors who left behind many great works but are barely recalled for one. The French writer Marguerite Duras made avant-garde films, wrote plays and books, fiction and non-fiction, and was widely admired throughout the 20th century. But only one work, a novel called The Lover, which she wrote at age 70 in 1984 and became a major movie production, made it big. Now, Duras is still a small part of our barely enduring cultural memory. Those are the lucky ones. As the band Wilco sings in the heartbreaking Late Greats, the best works of all never reach us, let alone are remembered. “The best band will never get signed. The Kay-Settes starring Butchers Blind,” croons Wilco’s singer Jeff Tweedy. “So good you won’t ever know. They never even played a show. Can’t hear them on the radio.”
Reprinted from Quartzy
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Spirit of resistance … Alain Mabanckou. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian Alain Mabanckou, a writer of ferocious wit and fearless inventiveness, has won acclaim for novels such as Broken Glass, African Psycho and Black Bazaar, which span the Congo-Brazzaville of his birth and the black communities of Paris, where he moved in 1989. In 2012, he won the Académie Française’s grand prix for a lifetime’s achievement. That same year, this UCLA professor returned to his home town of Pointe-Noire, on the Republic of Congo’s equatorial coast, after an absence of 23 years. The memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire was one fruit of that bittersweet return. His latest novel, Petit Piment, which was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, is another. Its English translation as Black Moses, by Helen Stevenson, is justly longlisted for this year’s Man Booker International prize. The novel is dedicated to all those “wanderers of the Côte Sauvage” – Pointe-Noire’s urban beach – who told the author “pieces of their life story” during his stay in the port city. Its ebullient humour recalls Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, Mabanckou’s fictionalised autobiography of growing up in the 1970s under a Marxist-Leninist regime. Yet unlike in that buoyantly mischievous child’s-eye satire, the laughter here has an undertow of grief, outrage and survivor’s guilt. Kids on the streets of Pointe-Noire. Photograph: Alamy The eponymous narrator of this picaresque tour-de-force is an inmate at an orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire. Abandoned as an infant, he is christened Moses by the kindly Papa Moupelo, a “pocket-sized” priest in elevator heels from neighboring Zaire, who is the children’s moral compass. Though his destiny as a saviour is uncertain, Moses stands up for the weak. His nickname, Little Pepper, derives from daringly avenging his best friend Bonaventure’s torment at the hands of bully-boy twins by spiking their midnight feasts with chili powder. Moses’ childhood is punctuated by loss, and tutored by power. The priest vanishes around the time that a crate of red kerchiefs for the orphans arrives from the government to mark the country’s adoption of scientific socialism. In place of the catechism, the orphanage force-feeds its “300 parrots” jargon lifted from Moscow and Romania. Next to disappear is his mother-substitute, Sabine, whose father was a Cuban soldier – one of 5,000 sent by Fidel Castro to next-door Angola. Sabine, his provider of stories and books, is forcibly retired by the orphanage director, Dieudonné, a mini-tyrant who appoints his brutish nephews as corridor wardens, and retains as caretaker a morgue attendant dismissed for necrophilia. Despite beating his charges and extracting sexual favours from single mothers, Dieudonné protests righteously to the orphanage inspectors checking for paedophiles: “They have that in Europe, not here!” Like the director, who was in the losing ethnic group (the Bembe) after the Marxist coup but survived because he “changes with the wind”, Moses soon learns to perfect his volte-face. Strategically allied with the bullying twins, he guiltily leaves the timid Bonaventure behind to escape to Pointe-Noire, and live as a petty thief, eating cat and dog meat (which disturbs his dreams), and sleeping with the street kids in the African quarter’s market. When a mayor intent on re-election mounts a clean-up drive against the “mosquitoes of the Grand Marché”, Moses finds refuge in a brothel, whose well-connected Zairean madam, Maman Fiat 500, lands him a job as a docker in the container port. Her profession is not a choice: “Only God can judge … There comes a day you look in the mirror, there’s nowhere to go, your back’s to the wall. So you cross the line, you offer your body to a passerby.” When the brothel is bulldozed in another mayoral drive, “Zero Zairean Whores in Pointe-Noire” (which leaves Congolese prostitutes in peace), the women are raped and deported or dumped in mass graves. In a novel whose characters expose the sharp end of corruption and nepotism, their treatment recalls Bonaventure’s mother, used as a “spare wheel” by a married public employee in the Water and Electricity company. Seeking his support for their illegitimate son, she had found herself in court for unpaid bills, with her light and water cut off. The litany of loss and injustice sends Moses, by now nearing 40, towards madness. Yet fired – like all Mabanckou heroes – by his reading of books, he dons a green hood, sewn by Malian tailors, in emulation of Robin Hood, and resolves to act. Moses’ narrative turns out to be a confession written from a penitentiary for the criminally insane – built on the site of the razed orphanage. Mabanckou’s indignation at times recalls Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s grotesque satire on dictatorship and kleptocracy – together with its spirit of resistance and hope of salvation. Yet there is also a touching personal homage in this retelling of the lives of some of those unable to escape the asylum. • Black Moses is published by Serpent’s Tail. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £11.04) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Story reprinted from the Guardian. “Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been named one of three winners of Le Grand Prix de l’héroïne Madame Figaro. The prize was established in 2006 by the French magazine Madame Figaro to celebrate heroines of French and foreign literature. Each year the shortlisted works are selected by the magazine’s editor. A team of judges, chaired by influential journalist Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, selected one French novel, one foreign novel in translation, and one nonfiction work. “Chère Ijeawele, ou un manifeste pour une éducation féministe,” the French translation of ‘Dear Ijeawele,’ was selected as the winner in the latter category. Along with Adichie, Alex Stresi was awarded the prize in the French novel category for ‘Lopping’ and Lauren Groff received the foreign novel prize for ‘Les Furies.’ Adichie’s French publisher, Marie-Pierre Gracedieu of Gallimard, commented: “When I read Dear Ijeawele, I felt an urge to share it with many friends, women and men, who had become parents of a girl in the recent years. Then I started to feel it had to be read by parents of boys too. And thereafter by everyone of us to investigate our own education, and try to overcome a few inherited clichés. “Therefore to publish it at Gallimard has meant a lot to me, and it is a very rewarding experience to see it awarded the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne by Madame Figaro, a prize that celebrates the power of literature and of characters as role models. “The fact that such an established and popular weekly has understood the importance of spreading the content of this letter-manifesto, even in the Western world, and especially in the political context we are now, brings me joy and hope.” This was the 12th edition of the prize. Story reprinted from the Guardian News. France's bad boy of literature takes 'French Bashing' to New York-
France’s bad boy of literature, Michel Houellebecq, has opened his first exhibition in the US, a multimedia work titled French Bashing that takes a mournful look at the country’s “peri-urban” wastelands whose inhabitants vote largely for far-Right leader Marine Le Pen. The author, one of France’s most provocative cultural figures and the country’s best-known writers abroad, has reworked a show held last year in Paris and will open it on June 2 in the Venus gallery in New York. The exhibition of photographs, photo-montages and immersive soundscapes shows aspects of France that few tourists get to see. It will focus for example on “peri-urban” zones - bleak places on the edges of cities that are somewhere between suburban and rural - where unemployment is high and poverty rife and where the far-Right’s populist lure strikes a chord. Houellebecq has been taking photos for decades but only a few years ago started exhibiting his images. The writer’s three-decade long literary career has produced a raft of novels such as Whatever, Atomised and The Map and the Territory, that look at sex tourism, Islam, and contemporary art. His most recent novel Submission imagines a Muslim candidate becoming president of France in 2022 after beating off his rival Marine Le Pen. The book was published, probably coincidentally, on the same day in January 2015 that jihadists launched a deadly assault on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine’s offices in Paris. The cover of that week’s edition carried a grotesque caricature of Houellebecq, wearing a wizard's hat, under the headline: "The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq." Article compliments of The Local France Photo: AFP Françoise Nyssen, a Belgian-born publisher, has been named France’s new culture minister, artnet News reports.
CEO of Éditions Actes Sud since 1987, Nyssen’s company has published the work of Nobel Laureates Imre Kertész and Svetlana Alexievitch. The company, founded by her father Hybert Nyssen, has grown astronomically under Françoise’s guidance—turning a profit of $85 million in 2015, according to the French edition of Huffington Post. Prior to her career in publishing in 1980 when she became a partner and CEO of the Cooperative d’Editions du Paradou, Nyssen was an urban planner in the Architecture Department of the Belgium Ministry of the Built Environment for four years. She holds a degree in urban planning from the Institut Supérieur d’Urbanisme et de Rénovation Urbaine in Brussels. Nyssen has been recognized for her contributions to the arts in the past. In 2008, Nyssen was named Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2013, was named “Officier” of the Order of the Legion of Honor for her contributions to French literature, Le Figaro reported. The French arts community has responded positively to the news. French gallerist Almine Rech told artnet News, “I think her nomination is a good thing because she has been the brilliant president of Actes Sud for many years, which was founded by her father and is one of the best publishing companies in France. They have published a collection of great books in relation to art, painting, cinema, and photography. Obviously the new minister knows her subject extremely well.” The announcement came as Macron revealed the first cabinet appointments yesterday. Nyssen will replace Audrey Azoulay, who served as culture minister from 2016–2017. Article compliments of AWP: The Writer's News. Image Credit: Éditions Actes Sud. Call for Submissions Dumas de Demain, The French Literary Magazine is home to all of the aspiring Dumas, Vernes and Sands who are eager to show the world their love of and passion for the written and spoken word. Send us your poetry, prose, fables, plays, visual poetry and spoken word videos, in French, and your best efforts will be published both online and in print. Regardant l'abîme vide de vos yeux
Et n'y voyant rien, aucune surprise, Je sais qu'il est sûr: je dis que vous N'êtes rien de plus qu'un homme qui Finira bientôt par disparaître. This edition is woven together by passionate concerns, concepts and questions. That French is simultaneously the language of sentiment and struggle, and of love and unbearable pain, is at the heart of many of the expressions collected in this edition.
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