A Year in Reading with Annette LePique
A 2023 awardee
Tell us what you read in 2024 that …
… was so beautifully written that you were envious.
My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld
… was a balm.
Practice by Rosalind Brown’s
… you’d recommend to other arts writers.
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie
… had you rethinking art history.
Vivienne by Emmalea Russo
Rosalind Brown’s Practice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) takes place over the course of a single day in the life of a young Oxford student. Throughout this day, our protagonist Annabel tries and fails to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. She is waylaid by daydreams, yoga, tea, and the early morning mists. Within these seemingly small struggles, Brown renders Annabel’s efforts into something beautiful; slowly and patiently the narrative unfolds like a new bloom. Soon we find ourselves gifted with the story of this young woman’s, this young scholar’s life.
For me, Practice is heavy with nostalgia. I was an exchange student at one of Oxford’s colleges during my undergraduate degree. I think of my experience as the ersatz version of Annabel’s life. I was an ok student (at best) who seemed to have a talent for crashing into vaguely sticky situations. Yet in reading and re-reading Practice, I’m struck by the peace I felt the first time I was able to write about art during a tutorial, the glee I held during my first encounter with the Ashmolean, and my wide-eyed amazement upon first sight of the city’s weekly market. I remember walking the city at night and standing under the Bridge of Sighs. I remember my favorite bookstore and the wake that took place there one day. I remember sitting down in reverence as attendees sang amongst the books. Practice allowed me to remember; and that act, the practice of memory, is a balm.
My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison and published by Graywolf Press early this year, is a harrowing and entrancing retelling of Nabokov’s Lolita (Olympia Press, 1955). Yet, Favorite is also an ode to the salvation offered through art-making, an investigation into the nature of complicity, and a prayer for the possibility of life after survival. The follow-up to Rijneveld’s International Man Booker prize-awarded The Discomfort of Evening, Favorite introduces readers to the titular “favorite” through the eyes of a veterinarian who recounts the story of his “great love” through court documents. Now in jail for his multiple crimes committed against a teen, the vet is telling the story to both the reader and his jury. Through Rijneveld’s pen we become one. This narrative decision I read not as an attempt to garner sympathy for the vet, but rather a way for the author to reckon with the totality of what brought us and the Favorite to this crossroads: a childhood marred by death, isolation, and a suffocating lack of love. Rijneveld has created something beautiful within the wake of the desolation caused by childhood sexual abuse. Their prose is uncomfortable, pyrotechnic; sentences can last pages and leap with life. This is a book that will live with me for a long time, in all its grotesque beauty.
Vivienne is the Surrealist I never knew I needed till I encountered her in Emmalea Russo’s 2024 novel of the same name. This imagined art history and a cautionary tale of art in a spiritually bereft landscape introduces readers to Vivienne, a former lover of German artist Hans Bellmer and an unsung doyenne of the Surrealist movement. Vivienne, now a grandmother in a labyrinthine East Coast clapboard with her daughter, granddaughter, and younger lover, is an artist whose fabric creations once clothed Bellmer’s dolls. Descriptions of Vivienne’s pieces call to mind the early violent swirls of Schiaparelli but they are imbued with less playfulness and more abjection; think a delicately wrought fetus handbag connected to a woman’s ballgown through a bloody jeweled umbilical cord, rather than a cocktail hour lobster. Yet, all is not well in Vivienne’s world. She was recently denied participation in a high-profile museum survey of Surrealist women artists due to her supposed role in the death of another Bellmer former lover, Unica Zürn. From here the three women are thrust into the limelight of the art world with all its wheelers and dealers, in a series of decisions that culminate in shocking tragedy. When I finished Vivienne (Arcade, 2024), I was struck by the purity of the central female characters. I say purity here in the spirit I believe Russo intends: not a quality that is beyond this world, something abstemious and apart, but rather something so totally of the world that it approaches something sacred.
Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s The Use of Photography (Seven Stories Press, 2024), translated to English this year by Alison L. Strayer, takes place from 2003-2004 and recounts the writers’ relationship and Exnaux’s breast cancer. The book is structured around photographs the couple took of their castoff clothes in various places (kitchens, hotels, bedrooms, and offices) after making love. Ernaux and Marie respond to each image in short texts that detail what both were thinking about during the time of the photo. I am not a photographer, nor do I like having my photo taken. I don’t especially like reading about photography. This book gave me an answer to why I might feel that way and that answer made me uncomfortable. I like art that makes me feel uncomfortable. In response to a photo titled, “The white mules” dated around early June 2003, Ernaux writes that photos “lock you into the moment.” This sense of capture, of a small death, is something I’ve long feared because I’m afraid of dying. In photos, I’m a chronic eye-closer or blur-maker; always moving or turned away from the finality of the lens. Photographs for me have always presented a form of compression, the magnitude of a moment bound within the frame. Yet, it’s this very sense of an ending that Ernaux and Marie’s work complicates and challenges. Though their relationship disintegrates and Ernaux’s fight with cancer ends, we’re left as readers to wonder what will happen next?
