Playboy
Constance Debré
Belletristik/Erzählende Literatur
Beschreibung
'Defiant, probing, hot' Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes
At the age of forty-three, the narrator abandons her marriage, her apartment and her successful legal career as a public defender to re-emerge as an out lesbian and a writer.
In a series of short, sharp vignettes, the narrator describes her first female lovers - a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior - punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father and her son.
Looking at the world through fresh eyes, she questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Unburdened by marital and familial obligations, a new woman emerges, free to examine gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.
A compelling chronicle of transgression, Playboy is Constance Debré's unflinching account of new bachelorhood. Laconic, aggressive and radically truthful, she chronicles the process that made her one of the most important French writers today.
Translated by Holly James
Rezensionen
At once cavernous and concise ... it is sharply observed, cool, and unbiased in its assessment of human folly.
This was my first Debré and will certainly not be my last. <i>Playboy </i>has no interest in the comfort of its readers. It is defiant, probing, hot, occasionally cruel, and never, ever sorry
You can'
Committed to truth-telling, no matter how rough, but also intriguingly suspended in a cloud of unknowing and pain, <i>Love Me Tender</i> is a wry, original, agonizing book destined to become a classic of its kind
<b>Praise for Constance Debré</b>
In <i>Playboy</i>, the French novelist Constance Debré is radical in shucking off not only the trappings of matrimony but also of class
<i>Playboy </i>is written in sharp, searing, and tender vignettes, peppered with desire, banality, and skewering takes on heteronormativity. Debré looks the reader right in the eye, and doesn't blink. It'
Playboy is a book that explodes what it means to be a woman in lust with another woman in a heteronormative world. An essential read
<i>Playboy </i>is an unparalleled document of desire that flies in the face of societal expectations. Debré's narrator pursues her own with a restless curiosity, all the more intense for its ambivalence, and calm coexistence with the emotional shrapnel left in its wake. This crushing bluntness is at once wounding, unmooring and transcendent; I can'
A continued, decisive force of writing
Fascinating ... <i>Playboy </i>is a story of bravery and ultimate personal freedom, and the costs that come with it
A deadpan, tensile thread of a voice: calm, Camusian, comic, stark, relentless, and totally hypnotic
Debré'
Bold and brash and at the same time quietly controlled ... Debré is brilliantly deadpan
A consideration of metamorphosis, motherhood and sexuality that feels bold and true
Shocking for its psychologically blank, bare-knuckle swagger
This is the most addictive book I've read since I can remember... Debré's observations about how men see women, and how she now sees women in turn, as a lesbian, are brutal and revelatory. Read the earth-shatteringly emotional <i>Love Me Tender</i> next, where Debré fights to keep custody of her young son post-divorce, despite her ex-husband'
Constance Debré has the power to make you gasp like no other writer - it's a thrill to be back with her taught-af prose rendered brilliantly into English by Holly James'
<i>Playboy</i> is a classic of the queer canon, exploring untilled ideas of bourgeois relationship to class, to body, and to sexuality. Debre'
Her scalpel-like stylistic approach makes the rebellious content of Debré'
Challenging yet empowering ... refreshing
Debré writes matter of factly, fluidly, scabrously, laying bare the hypocrisies of society, of institutions, of families ... direct the way a laser is direct
Tight, present-tense prose ... genuinely inspiring
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