Love Is Colder Than the Lake – Liliane Giraudon
Love Is Colder Than the Lake by Liliane Giraudon, translated by Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner / 95-page paperback from Nightboat Books / ISBN 9781643621975
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Searing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon’s power and range.
“[Giraudon’s] voice is hypnotic, inscrutable, unique. A trip through one of her narratives is like a somnambular stroll through a rain-soaked ravine with an unreadable road map; a ramble in fugue-state through a wilderness where signposts are written in the language of emotion and the logic of the heart.” —Gilbert Albert-Gilbert
Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon’s own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon’s writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.
