Perséphone 2014

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Presentation

“For years I lived in a myth. I wrote about this myth in a text that was always in process. Everything I was going through went into it – men, cities, books, seasons in hell, joys, rages, everything, the myth was both a vital structure and a novelistic machine that took everything in. One day I set the manuscript aside to write other novels. They have only ever encrypted it.

So I returned to the matrix, went back underground. Persephone 2014 is a new point of intersection between this story (this mad old story) and mine, between the ancient and the ultra-contemporary. What happens when a myth takes over a life, pulverising it into raw passions and elementary events? What I hear of Persephone, of this very ancient, lilting voice, is the desire to be matter, the desire of a self undermined and a world turned upside-down. And also, how is it possible to leave this desire behind and come back from Hell? And then, should it be left behind? And where is Hell? Does it lie in roots, magnificent devastation and silent fires? Or in surface realms, smooth forms, legitimate orders and established rites?

Returning to Persephone means stubbornly continuing to investigate the secret that binds pleasure, death and writing tightly together.”

G.A.

Gwenaëlle Aubry was born in 1971. A philosopher and novelist, her publications include Le Diable détacheur, L’Isolée, L’Isolement, Notre vie s’use en transfigurations, Personne (Prix Femina 2009, translated as No One in 2012), Partages (2012) and Lazare mon amour (2015). She has been translated into ten languages.