Between realities, 26 May 2008
"It is one long day: with a dawn; early light... the sun is coming up ... executing its circle ... dipping again slightly... rising a little higher ... during a good fifty human days, pink and orange." After that it stays for some hundred days until it slowly reverses the circles and dips into a dark period. This is Antarctica and the backdrop to Darrieussecq's extraordinary novel. Lyrical in its descriptions of the icy landscape, intriguing in its portrayal of the main characters, the author engages the reader, slowly but surely, in an exploration of human nature when placed into harsh environments.

The White Project - set sometime in the future - intends to establish a permanent European base in the centre of Antarctica, 15 kilometres from the South Pole. In preparation of the base, international teams of researchers, technicians, building crews spend summers there advancing the project. The story centres around Edmée and Peter - a radio technician and a heating engineer. Both had failed to join the first manned Mars Mission in progress and joined the White Project instead. Alternating in the description between the two characters' journey to the station - one by air and one by sea - the reader knows more about them than they seem to find out about each other.

Expectations in the reader are heightened when the two protagonists finally reach the research camp. Peter is the most aloof of the team members, usually keeping to himself, his routine only interrupted by the generator's frequent alarm calls. Edmée, as the station's link to the outside world is more in tune with everybody, but wonders about Peter's reserve; he doesn't ask for airtime to call home. The plot is relatively simple, circling around the two protagonists with other characters' interactions acting as a frame to the central narrative. While aware of their interdependence for survival in this isolated place, all residents appear to isolate themselves and ignore safety rules.

Darrieussecq's primary focus lies in the deep and changing impact the barren landscape has on the station's inhabitants. She evokes the hauntingly beautiful atmosphere brilliantly: white on white, horizon and sky merge; a whitish sun beaming down relentlessly. The line between reality and fantasy blurs; a dream-like state of mind can lead to uncontrolled and even dangerous action. The author introduces another voice, or voices, that emphasizes the surreal dimension of the landscape. The "We", the ghosts of past explorers, perished in the ice, and other spirits hover around the station and intermittently zoom in on the two protagonists; they have their own ideas about the events between them and how they should unfold...Will they hear the voices?

A short, beautifully written book by one of France's most innovative authors of today. It requires slow reading so that every sentence can be savoured, hints absorbed and pictures formed of the landscape and the people who explore it. [Friederike Knabe]

Dreamlike Poetic, 30 Mar 2006
This is not a story where anything 'happens' as such, but the beauty of the book lies in how the words flow so sublimely. I just loved dipping in and out of the minds of the characters. I love the way the authoress has captured the way minds really work; the way the past and present overlap in our waking thoughts. It reminds me somewhat of Heart of Darkness; though this is more 'Heart of Whiteness'

Ah, this didn't do it for me, 22 Mar 2006
This has got a load of good reviews written on its cover, but it really didn't do it for me. Very little happens: I won't spoil what does, but as I read it, I did keep on looking at how many pages remained and thinking - not much space for the actual events to happen here! And I got to the end thinking - what, that's it? Those are the events in the novel?

The prose can be very evocative of the wilderness, but the parallels are built very heavy-handedly: eg, one section begins 'Edmee, thirty-something, from... '; the next begins 'Peter, thirty-something, from...' and ON IT GOES.

Several questions are also left unanswered which I at least found frustrating: if it is impossible to stay there without heating, how did the heating get installed in the first place? Who could have bombed (from the air) one of the character's family? Why - why!? - would anyone come to the base by sea in 2015? Etc Etc.

I could go on but in sum dear reader, I would not recommend this book to you.

Marie Darrieussecq's mesmerising novel A Brief Stay with the Living continues her concern with deciphering, understanding and writing loss. In her previous two novels (My Phantom Husband and Breathing Underwater) Darrieussecq had carefully and beautifully drawn the disorientating effect of being left or leaving; of grief without mourning (concerns about the presence of absence being so much a fixation with Lacanians such as Darian Leader, to whom, among others, she dedicates her book). And in Brief Stay, a novel narrated by four voices (a mother and her three daughters), she further investigates her theme by deepening it; here each character is trying separately to cope with the death of son/brother Pierre.

A writer of considerable talents with a love of wordplay and allusion, Darrieussecq's prose-poetry will not be to everyone's tastes. The book is a tad ostentatious, told in a dense, discordant, sometimes self-indulgent stream of consciousness, often seeming confused and certainly confusing; the characterisation paltry, the focus uneven, but the attempt is brave, the writing vivid, the voice intelligent and the book, while exacting, ultimately prepossessing and entrancing. Marie Darrieussecq continues to grow into an important writer worth reading and discussing. --Mark Thwaite

What goes through your mind, how do you begin to make sense of things, when your husband goes out for a few minutes to buy bread--and never returns? Marie Darrieussecq's first novel, translated as Pig Tales and a huge bestseller in her native France, was a surreal account of a woman slowly being transformed into a sow. Her new book details the inner transformations undergone by a woman unaccountably left by her husband: what both novels share is an acute sense of the place of women in modern society while remaining fastidiously accurate to the sensibilities of their protagonists. Both novels ask questions about the degree to which identity is grounded in the perception of others, in the mirrored symbiosis of relationships.

What really sets Darrieussecq apart from many other writers is her attention to language--although My Phantom Husband is a short book, it invites considered reading--the closely focused prose allows the reader to track the micro-climates of anxiety, fear, listlessness, shock, hallucination and despair (not to mention inadvertent humour) as they affect the mind of the narrator. Darrieussecq renders unsparingly the meandering shifts and bifurcations of the traumatised self: like the edges of fractal curves, thoughts spool and fracture outwards or converge on some strange attractor--everything is in the emotional detail, the tidal oscillation between hyper-sensitised and desensitised states.

Echoing the previous book, there is a hint of surreality here: the undefined location of the book is some curiously hybrid postcolonial landscape and Darrieussecq subtly sets up reverberations between inner mental terrain and outward place, hinting at other possible readings of the book's psychic drama. Finally though it is the immediate impression that is so affecting in what is, quite simply, an extraordinary and powerful study of loss. --Burhan Tufail

Marie Darrieussecq's unique and beautiful book Breathing Underwater is a breathtaking display by a young novelist whose previous two works had already marked her out as a serious and sensual writer of some power. Pig Tales was the enormously successful story of a woman's transformation into a sow, a bizarre but telling fairy tale that spoke intelligently about gender, identity, sexuality and change. Phantom Husband was a compelling and disturbing drama: a woman's husband disappears one day, no word, no reason why. How, in such a position of absence, without the fact of loss, does one carry on and cope? And what does grieving mean without its object? Breathing Underwater, despite its apparent slightness, builds on and further investigates these themes and is an absolute triumph.

The main voice in the book, an unnamed young mother, walks out on her husband and her life (a situation that is almost the direct inversion of that in Phantom Husband). She takes herself and her daughter to the seaside. She escapes, although we don't really know what from. And in the most fluid, elegant, unhurried, aqueous prose-poetry she, her mother and her daughter are all seen succumbing, surviving and changing. Darrieussecq bravely eschews any temptation to psychoanalyse her characters or to moralise about them. We, as readers, are simply invited to observe. And despite the heat-haze, the blinding brightness of the sun, the enervating heat, what we observe are the slow, languid transformations that the coast evokes. There is a sensuality somehow embedded in this writing and a wonderful intelligence. Breathing Underwater almost defies description: limpid but with a compelling ambiguity, often it is only toward the end of an often long paragraph that we know who has spoken; enigmatic and allusive but also lucid, simple and direct. This is writing of the highest standard but, more importantly perhaps, a lovely, very affecting, lambent treat of a novel. Mark Thwaite

Between realities, 26 May 2008
"It is one long day: with a dawn; early light... the sun is coming up ... executing its circle ... dipping again slightly... rising a little higher ... during a good fifty human days, pink and orange." After that it stays for some hundred days until it slowly reverses the circles and dips into a dark period. This is Antarctica and the backdrop to Darrieussecq's extraordinary novel. Lyrical in its descriptions of the icy landscape, intriguing in its portrayal of the main characters, the author engages the reader, slowly but surely, in an exploration of human nature when placed into harsh environments.

The White Project - set sometime in the future - intends to establish a permanent European base in the centre of Antarctica, 15 kilometres from the South Pole. In preparation of the base, international teams of researchers, technicians, building crews spend summers there advancing the project. The story centres around Edmée and Peter - a radio technician and a heating engineer. Both had failed to join the first manned Mars Mission in progress and joined the White Project instead. Alternating in the description between the two characters' journey to the station - one by air and one by sea - the reader knows more about them than they seem to find out about each other.

Expectations in the reader are heightened when the two protagonists finally reach the research camp. Peter is the most aloof of the team members, usually keeping to himself, his routine only interrupted by the generator's frequent alarm calls. Edmée, as the station's link to the outside world is more in tune with everybody, but wonders about Peter's reserve; he doesn't ask for airtime to call home. The plot is relatively simple, circling around the two protagonists with other characters' interactions acting as a frame to the central narrative. While aware of their interdependence for survival in this isolated place, all residents appear to isolate themselves and ignore safety rules.

Darrieussecq's primary focus lies in the deep and changing impact the barren landscape has on the station's inhabitants. She evokes the hauntingly beautiful atmosphere brilliantly: white on white, horizon and sky merge; a whitish sun beaming down relentlessly. The line between reality and fantasy blurs; a dream-like state of mind can lead to uncontrolled and even dangerous action. The author introduces another voice, or voices, that emphasizes the surreal dimension of the landscape. The "We", the ghosts of past explorers, perished in the ice, and other spirits hover around the station and intermittently zoom in on the two protagonists; they have their own ideas about the events between them and how they should unfold...Will they hear the voices?

A short, beautifully written book by one of France's most innovative authors of today. It requires slow reading so that every sentence can be savoured, hints absorbed and pictures formed of the landscape and the people who explore it. [Friederike Knabe]

Dreamlike Poetic, 30 Mar 2006
This is not a story where anything 'happens' as such, but the beauty of the book lies in how the words flow so sublimely. I just loved dipping in and out of the minds of the characters. I love the way the authoress has captured the way minds really work; the way the past and present overlap in our waking thoughts. It reminds me somewhat of Heart of Darkness; though this is more 'Heart of Whiteness'

Ah, this didn't do it for me, 22 Mar 2006
This has got a load of good reviews written on its cover, but it really didn't do it for me. Very little happens: I won't spoil what does, but as I read it, I did keep on looking at how many pages remained and thinking - not much space for the actual events to happen here! And I got to the end thinking - what, that's it? Those are the events in the novel?

The prose can be very evocative of the wilderness, but the parallels are built very heavy-handedly: eg, one section begins 'Edmee, thirty-something, from... '; the next begins 'Peter, thirty-something, from...' and ON IT GOES.

Several questions are also left unanswered which I at least found frustrating: if it is impossible to stay there without heating, how did the heating get installed in the first place? Who could have bombed (from the air) one of the character's family? Why - why!? - would anyone come to the base by sea in 2015? Etc Etc.

I could go on but in sum dear reader, I would not recommend this book to you.

Strange and unusual, 05 Jan 2003
This book is indoubtedly unlike most others i have read, and to be honest i'm still making my mind up as to wheather or not i liked it. Firstly, be prepared, there is no story at all. The synopsis says it all. It is all about the style, the attention to detail of the world and how the author's descriptions make the world somehow strange or unfamiliar. Forget dialogue, getting to grips with characters or even their names, and the reader never uncovers the motives of the characters in this book. This can be a difficult read and at times i was unsure about which character was in the spotlight as the narration jumps around a lot. There seems at a first glance to be a lot against this novel, but i paradoxically found that what made this novel infuriating at times, the ambiguity, vagueness also are its strenghts. It is highly poetic and leaves a lot of responsibility with the reader regarding the book's interpretation or meaning. Maybe this is a case of getting out what you put in. Try it for yourself.

One from the postmodern, quantum universe, 07 Oct 2001
The plot is simple: a married woman leaves her husband, taking their young daughter with her on a bid to escape her life.The husband, with the help of a private detective, attempts to track them down as they move from place to place across the continent. But that is not the main reason for reading this novel.
Breathing Underwater, like Darrieussecq's other novels, wings its way straight from the postmodern, quantum universe, breaking down all physical and mental boundaries. The psychological merges with the material in this hyper-real tale of a mother and daughter relationship. As usual,Darrieussecq challenges all fixed ways of thinking, being and believing. Through the several(first-person) narrators we begin to get a picture of a world in continual flux, ever-changing and never safe, and we are never quite sure where the dividing line lies between mind and world. This is all heightened by the vivid coastal setting. Highly recommended.

highly imaginative but unfortunately rather laborious!, 11 Jul 2001
This was the first publication adopted by a newly formed reading group. Most were excited to embark on this new journey and were poised books at the ready to divulge each page hungrily. Unfortunatley not many reached the end! The outcome being that the book was "hard work", "cold", "detached" and generally lacked any entertainment value. No sympathy was felt for the nameless women who ultimately sacrifised her life and child, for what? It is obvious that the talent behind the construction of the text is tremendous and the authors treatment of the subject and technique most origional BUT all this did not lend itself to an enjoyable read. Maybe something was lost in the translation?

Between realities, 26 May 2008
"It is one long day: with a dawn; early light... the sun is coming up ... executing its circle ... dipping again slightly... rising a little higher ... during a good fifty human days, pink and orange." After that it stays for some hundred days until it slowly reverses the circles and dips into a dark period. This is Antarctica and the backdrop to Darrieussecq's extraordinary novel. Lyrical in its descriptions of the icy landscape, intriguing in its portrayal of the main characters, the author engages the reader, slowly but surely, in an exploration of human nature when placed into harsh environments.

The White Project - set sometime in the future - intends to establish a permanent European base in the centre of Antarctica, 15 kilometres from the South Pole. In preparation of the base, international teams of researchers, technicians, building crews spend summers there advancing the project. The story centres around Edmée and Peter - a radio technician and a heating engineer. Both had failed to join the first manned Mars Mission in progress and joined the White Project instead. Alternating in the description between the two characters' journey to the station - one by air and one by sea - the reader knows more about them than they seem to find out about each other.

Expectations in the reader are heightened when the two protagonists finally reach the research camp. Peter is the most aloof of the team members, usually keeping to himself, his routine only interrupted by the generator's frequent alarm calls. Edmée, as the station's link to the outside world is more in tune with everybody, but wonders about Peter's reserve; he doesn't ask for airtime to call home. The plot is relatively simple, circling around the two protagonists with other characters' interactions acting as a frame to the central narrative. While aware of their interdependence for survival in this isolated place, all residents appear to isolate themselves and ignore safety rules.

Darrieussecq's primary focus lies in the deep and changing impact the barren landscape has on the station's inhabitants. She evokes the hauntingly beautiful atmosphere brilliantly: white on white, horizon and sky merge; a whitish sun beaming down relentlessly. The line between reality and fantasy blurs; a dream-like state of mind can lead to uncontrolled and even dangerous action. The author introduces another voice, or voices, that emphasizes the surreal dimension of the landscape. The "We", the ghosts of past explorers, perished in the ice, and other spirits hover around the station and intermittently zoom in on the two protagonists; they have their own ideas about the events between them and how they should unfold...Will they hear the voices?

A short, beautifully written book by one of France's most innovative authors of today. It requires slow reading so that every sentence can be savoured, hints absorbed and pictures formed of the landscape and the people who explore it. [Friederike Knabe]

Dreamlike Poetic, 30 Mar 2006
This is not a story where anything 'happens' as such, but the beauty of the book lies in how the words flow so sublimely. I just loved dipping in and out of the minds of the characters. I love the way the authoress has captured the way minds really work; the way the past and present overlap in our waking thoughts. It reminds me somewhat of Heart of Darkness; though this is more 'Heart of Whiteness'

Ah, this didn't do it for me, 22 Mar 2006
This has got a load of good reviews written on its cover, but it really didn't do it for me. Very little happens: I won't spoil what does, but as I read it, I did keep on looking at how many pages remained and thinking - not much space for the actual events to happen here! And I got to the end thinking - what, that's it? Those are the events in the novel?

The prose can be very evocative of the wilderness, but the parallels are built very heavy-handedly: eg, one section begins 'Edmee, thirty-something, from... '; the next begins 'Peter, thirty-something, from...' and ON IT GOES.

Several questions are also left unanswered which I at least found frustrating: if it is impossible to stay there without heating, how did the heating get installed in the first place? Who could have bombed (from the air) one of the character's family? Why - why!? - would anyone come to the base by sea in 2015? Etc Etc.

I could go on but in sum dear reader, I would not recommend this book to you.

Strange and unusual, 05 Jan 2003
This book is indoubtedly unlike most others i have read, and to be honest i'm still making my mind up as to wheather or not i liked it. Firstly, be prepared, there is no story at all. The synopsis says it all. It is all about the style, the attention to detail of the world and how the author's descriptions make the world somehow strange or unfamiliar. Forget dialogue, getting to grips with characters or even their names, and the reader never uncovers the motives of the characters in this book. This can be a difficult read and at times i was unsure about which character was in the spotlight as the narration jumps around a lot. There seems at a first glance to be a lot against this novel, but i paradoxically found that what made this novel infuriating at times, the ambiguity, vagueness also are its strenghts. It is highly poetic and leaves a lot of responsibility with the reader regarding the book's interpretation or meaning. Maybe this is a case of getting out what you put in. Try it for yourself.

One from the postmodern, quantum universe, 07 Oct 2001
The plot is simple: a married woman leaves her husband, taking their young daughter with her on a bid to escape her life.The husband, with the help of a private detective, attempts to track them down as they move from place to place across the continent. But that is not the main reason for reading this novel.
Breathing Underwater, like Darrieussecq's other novels, wings its way straight from the postmodern, quantum universe, breaking down all physical and mental boundaries. The psychological merges with the material in this hyper-real tale of a mother and daughter relationship. As usual,Darrieussecq challenges all fixed ways of thinking, being and believing. Through the several(first-person) narrators we begin to get a picture of a world in continual flux, ever-changing and never safe, and we are never quite sure where the dividing line lies between mind and world. This is all heightened by the vivid coastal setting. Highly recommended.

highly imaginative but unfortunately rather laborious!, 11 Jul 2001
This was the first publication adopted by a newly formed reading group. Most were excited to embark on this new journey and were poised books at the ready to divulge each page hungrily. Unfortunatley not many reached the end! The outcome being that the book was "hard work", "cold", "detached" and generally lacked any entertainment value. No sympathy was felt for the nameless women who ultimately sacrifised her life and child, for what? It is obvious that the talent behind the construction of the text is tremendous and the authors treatment of the subject and technique most origional BUT all this did not lend itself to an enjoyable read. Maybe something was lost in the translation?

Between realities, 26 May 2008
"It is one long day: with a dawn; early light... the sun is coming up ... executing its circle ... dipping again slightly... rising a little higher ... during a good fifty human days, pink and orange." After that it stays for some hundred days until it slowly reverses the circles and dips into a dark period. This is Antarctica and the backdrop to Darrieussecq's extraordinary novel. Lyrical in its descriptions of the icy landscape, intriguing in its portrayal of the main characters, the author engages the reader, slowly but surely, in an exploration of human nature when placed into harsh environments.

The White Project - set sometime in the future - intends to establish a permanent European base in the centre of Antarctica, 15 kilometres from the South Pole. In preparation of the base, international teams of researchers, technicians, building crews spend summers there advancing the project. The story centres around Edmée and Peter - a radio technician and a heating engineer. Both had failed to join the first manned Mars Mission in progress and joined the White Project instead. Alternating in the description between the two characters' journey to the station - one by air and one by sea - the reader knows more about them than they seem to find out about each other.

Expectations in the reader are heightened when the two protagonists finally reach the research camp. Peter is the most aloof of the team members, usually keeping to himself, his routine only interrupted by the generator's frequent alarm calls. Edmée, as the station's link to the outside world is more in tune with everybody, but wonders about Peter's reserve; he doesn't ask for airtime to call home. The plot is relatively simple, circling around the two protagonists with other characters' interactions acting as a frame to the central narrative. While aware of their interdependence for survival in this isolated place, all residents appear to isolate themselves and ignore safety rules.

Darrieussecq's primary focus lies in the deep and changing impact the barren landscape has on the station's inhabitants. She evokes the hauntingly beautiful atmosphere brilliantly: white on white, horizon and sky merge; a whitish sun beaming down relentlessly. The line between reality and fantasy blurs; a dream-like state of mind can lead to uncontrolled and even dangerous action. The author introduces another voice, or voices, that emphasizes the surreal dimension of the landscape. The "We", the ghosts of past explorers, perished in the ice, and other spirits hover around the station and intermittently zoom in on the two protagonists; they have their own ideas about the events between them and how they should unfold...Will they hear the voices?

A short, beautifully written book by one of France's most innovative authors of today. It requires slow reading so that every sentence can be savoured, hints absorbed and pictures formed of the landscape and the people who explore it. [Friederike Knabe]

Dreamlike Poetic, 30 Mar 2006
This is not a story where anything 'happens' as such, but the beauty of the book lies in how the words flow so sublimely. I just loved dipping in and out of the minds of the characters. I love the way the authoress has captured the way minds really work; the way the past and present overlap in our waking thoughts. It reminds me somewhat of Heart of Darkness; though this is more 'Heart of Whiteness'

Ah, this didn't do it for me, 22 Mar 2006
This has got a load of good reviews written on its cover, but it really didn't do it for me. Very little happens: I won't spoil what does, but as I read it, I did keep on looking at how many pages remained and thinking - not much space for the actual events to happen here! And I got to the end thinking - what, that's it? Those are the events in the novel?

The prose can be very evocative of the wilderness, but the parallels are built very heavy-handedly: eg, one section begins 'Edmee, thirty-something, from... '; the next begins 'Peter, thirty-something, from...' and ON IT GOES.

Several questions are also left unanswered which I at least found frustrating: if it is impossible to stay there without heating, how did the heating get installed in the first place? Who could have bombed (from the air) one of the character's family? Why - why!? - would anyone come to the base by sea in 2015? Etc Etc.

I could go on but in sum dear reader, I would not recommend this book to you.