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    Faces on the Tip of My Tongue
    Unavailable
    Faces on the Tip of My Tongue
    Unavailable
    Faces on the Tip of My Tongue
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Faces on the Tip of My Tongue

    By Emmanuelle Pagano

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion.

    The late wedding guest isn’t your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano’s stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour. A superb, cumulative collection from a unique French voice.

    Why Peirene chose to publish this book:

    This is a spellbinding web of stories about people on the periphery. Pagano makes rural France her subject matter. She invokes the closeness of a local community and the links between the inhabitants’ lives. But then she reminds us how little we know of each other.

    ‘Devastatingly beautiful.’ Le Soir, Belgium

    ‘A treasure hunt that you can follow from title to title…fine-tipped drawings of little bits of the world that attach themselves to each other imperceptibly.’ Xavier Houssin, Le Monde

    ‘Pagano succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism.’ Chris Power, The Guardian

    ‘Endlessly beautiful and poignant.’ Le Monde books of the year 2012

    ‘With animal writing, Emmanuelle Pagano invites herself to the side of rebels and solitaries.’ Marine Landrot, Télérama

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeirene Press
    Release dateOct 22, 2019
    ISBN9781908670557
    Unavailable
    Faces on the Tip of My Tongue
    Author

    Emmanuelle Pagano

    Emmanuelle Pagano was born in Rodez, southern France, in 1969. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and she has won many awards for her work, including the EU Prize for Literature in 2009 and, most recently, the Prix du Roman d’Écologie in 2018. This is her second book to appear in English. The first, Trysting, was published in 2016 by And Other Stories.

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    Reviews for Faces on the Tip of My Tongue

    4/5

    8 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Downbeat with Some Dark HumourReview of the pre-release paperback (2019) (136pp) translation of selections from the French language original "Un renard à mains nues" (2012) (A Fox With Bare Hands) (340pp)As explained by the excellent translators Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis in their afterword to Faces..., this collection of stories has been chosen based on character and incident connections i.e. where each story references people from another one. This tightens the bonds of the book turning it into a novel-in-short-stories. It also helps it adhere to the readable-in-one-sitting house style of Peirene Press.It does seem though that the resulting selection has made this more of a depressing and downbeat affair with a few too many stories revolving around hitchhikers lurking or planning suicides on hidden highway approaches and/or the strangling of foxes with bare hands (to put a mortally injured animal out of its misery). I certainly did not feel like reading this in one sitting as it just became too depressing after a while. Spreading it over several days may cause one to miss some of the internal cross-references though. You can see from a comparison to the French original (340pp) that almost 2/3rds of the stories have been dropped in the translation (136*pp). I wonder if any of those had a bit more joy and happiness to them?I mostly enjoyed "The Automatic Tour-Guide" with its permanent gîte**-resident spinner of local tourist trivia tales (partially invented by themselves) and "The Dropout" with its wedding crasher.Faces... is part of Peirene Press's subscription series where direct purchases from the publisher are shipped 1-2 months in advance of the official publication date and availability through other retailers. Faces... will be officially published October 22, 2019.* 136pp is the official page count from the publisher, but I have the book in hand and it is only 128pp even if you count the 4 unnumbered pages at the back end.** small furnished tourist cabins or houses in rural France.
    • 4/5
      This is a set of inter-related short stories, rather than a novel. Frequently an incident in one story is related by another person, from an alternate perspective, in another story. They are all related in the first person and, at times, it took a while to work out who the speaker was, male or female, young or old, and older or younger self compared to another of the stories. It was trancelike in its effect, leaving you always peering at the truth through a distorting mirror - what is real and what is not? At times the tellers themselves are not clear in their own mind. The depiction of the roadside looney and his waiting for an event that can never occur is one example of the mental uncertainty that exists here. The last story in the book was the most isolated, but the most personal, in that it related directly to the act of reading and interacting with other readers of the same books. That was worth waiting for.