The Collection by Nina Leger

French fiction

Original title – Mise en Pièces

Translator – Laura Francis

Source – Library

I was planning to review another book today, but I picked this up last night and read it in an evening. At the start of this year, Women in Translation month, I visited the library and found a few books that I had maybe missed over the last while, and this was one of them. I think I may have seen this when it came out about six years ago, but it was one I never got to iut was the second novel by the writer, and it won the Anaïs Nin prize.In an interview, I read an interview with her, and she said she had written the book to subvert the male gaze to a female gaze of the geography of Paris. We follow Jeanne and her quests around Paris. She has taught novel writing as well.

Drowsiness, tender and shadowy folds, abandonment to torpor. Dilation, rising, elastic rigidity, too narrow in form to contain the new mass, compressed, veins protruding.

Jeanne maintains utmost concentration.

Her gestures are slow, diligent. She passes the penis between her fingers, into her mouth, presses it against her face. She examines it, occasionally putting it to her ear to listen to the blood beating, follows the curve of the head with her thumb, feels for the slit which drinks up her saliva.

She isolates the penis between her two cupped hands, excludes the body, and fixates upon the mobility of the organ that gradually fills the space. The furniture dimin-ishes, the details blanch out. She remains alone with the penis which she has made her own. Even her own body has lost substance.

One of the numerous meets this early on in the book

Now Jeannequest is a woman who likes men, and the book follows her with her numerous encounters with men. But also her view of the various men’s penis and the way they make love. I don’t know Paris well enough to grasp the travelling around, but she seems to make arrangements to meet and just have sex with these men, and the book is complete with how she positions her body in the sexual conquests. She is a woman who seems to rule over the men, and as we drift from the various hotel rooms, they end up in or even more or less discrete situations. Even on a trip abroad, she has sex. Burt, with her added commentary on the various men’s parts and the multiple shapes and sizes they come in. I laughed as the cover art is mushrooms of various size and shapes a sort of sneaky wink to the penises within the book!

It is in hotels that Jeanne finds the necessary elements to furnish her palace. She appropriated a doormat and some candlesticks from the Hôtel Saint-Pierre, net curtains from Timhotel, bedspreads from the Hôtel du Delta and the Hôtel Cambrai, some obsolete ashtrays and two bedside lamps from the Hôtel de Nice. The palace is an exquisite cadaver of the Parisian hotel trade.

Jeanne passes through her domain in the evening, at bedtime, in the morning, upon waking; she roams around it between appointments, in the midst of loud dinners where conversations stream out without spilling a drop onto her, in the crystalline sharpness of the beauty counters in department stores, under the halogen bulbs of waiting rooms.

Sometimes, she interacts at length with a particular penis. Attentive to the fidelity of the memory, she approaches, observes, drinks in the details. Hours pass in slow meanderings and interminable pauses until she leaves the room, reluctantly, careful not to disturb the stillness of the forms.

Some of the hotel next I am in Paris I will see these hotels and think of this book

I think this is an excellent book as it is a very positive view of a female that would otherwise be looked down on by a male writer or made to seem a real man if she were a male bed jumping. She has changed the sort of sexual dynamic, and the men she is sleeping with get described like I have seen many a woman years ago when I used to read people like Roth, etc. But this has that French sort of normality to the numerous sexual acts. This is what would happen if Anne Eernaux were sex mad and sleeping with lots of men. Add to that the way she captures the male penis in it, in many strange and different styles, and how each one in her own way makes Jeanne approach in a certain way, it is like a guide of how she tackled these men and the style and techniques she used. The various rooms and types of men she met all this as she criss-crossed Paris to meet in various Hotels. Have you read any of her books?