Not One Day

by Anne Garreta, Emma Ramadan (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize

Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards

Finalist for the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize

Not One Day begins with a maxim: “Not one day without a woman.” What follows is an intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter recounting of loves and lovers past, breathtakingly written, exploring the interplay between memory, fantasy, and desire.

“For life is too short to submit to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women one does not love.”

Anne Garréta, author of the groundbreaking novel Sphinx (Deep Vellum, 2015), is a member of the renowned Oulipo literary group. Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941920541
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Pages:	150
Sales rank:	950,582
Product dimensions:	7.70(w) x 4.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalienne (graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx hailed by critics in France and the US alike, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002 for this novel, Not One Day, awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award–-Georges Perec won in 1978).

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University, received her Master's in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris, and recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco. Her translation of Anne Garreta's Sphinx was published by Deep Vellum in spring 2015 and was nominated for both the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Her translation of Anne Parian’s prose poem Monospace was released by La Presse in fall 2015, and her translation of Fouad Laroui’s Prix Goncourt story collection The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers was published in spring 2016. Her forthcoming translations of Laroui's debut novel in English The Tribulations of the Last Sjilmassi, and Brice Matthiuessent’s Revenge of the Translator will be published by Deep Vellum in 2017.

Editorial Reviews

02/27/2017
From Oulipo member and French author of the genderless love story Sphinx comes a short but deep exploration of the nature and complexity of desire and longing. The newly translated work is laid out like a confessional writing experiment. For five hours each day over the course of a month, Garréta aims to record unedited memories of past romances as she remembers them. The project stretches on for more than a year, and the end result is a series of 12 vignettes that ranges in intensity and focus. The women she describes come in all stripes. There’s C* in the Roman night club, whom she was both attracted to and repulsed by; E*, a boring married novelist who used Garréta to explore extramarital same-sex fantasies; and D*, who sparked a weekend-long spree of orgiastic sex in every position and involving every piece of furniture. In recounting her friendship with the older K*, Garréta realizes for the first time how much she adores and misses her. While the idea of such a collection seems either refreshingly lurid or self-indulgent, Garréta’s prose leans more toward distanced and academic than erotic. Though she asks pressing questions throughout—“How many times have we truly, savagely, imperatively desired a body?”; how do you know if a conquest reciprocates your feelings?; Is it possible to rid yourself of the self?—the book’s final chapter hints at her dissatisfaction with both her methods of inquiry and the answers she’s finally left with. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Winner of Prix Médicis 2002

Recommended in CLMP’s 2020 “Reading List for Pride Month & Beyond”!

Selected by Words Without Borders as one of 8 Queer Books in Translation to Read for Pride Month 2020!

One of Literary Hub's "30 Books We're Looking Forward to" in 2017

"In Not One Day, originally published in 2002 in French, Garréta permits us to inhabit her body through memory, embracing the messiness of desire, not cisheteronormativity." — Cheyenne Heckerman, Anomaly

“Winner of the Prix Medicis, this intense collection of Garreta’s memories of past loves—written under strict Oulipian constraints—is at times at once tender, bitter, and intimate.” — Literary Hub

“Like a skilled performance artist, Garréta… simultaneously inhabits bodies and spaces.” — Youmna Chlala, BOMB Magazine

"Not One Day is a novel both fluid and complex, crowded and lonely, and rooted in an uncomfortable position." — Eva Domeneghini

“A master of thought and language, an astounding authority and elegance.” — Anne Serre, Marie Claire

One of Flavorwire’s “22 Essential Women Writers to Read in Translation”

“Garréta more or less perfected the post-modern confessional, doing so with a self-awareness that many authors fail to accomplish… Not One Day is a casual revelation; a delight.” — Sean Redmond, fields Magazine

“Deep Vellum has brought out one of the best books I’ve read this year, one whose compact nature contains more room inside than might be guessed from its modest exterior. Happily, Anne Garréta’s ambition is to create books that are not the products of an assembly line.” — Jeff Bursey, The Winnipeg Review

“Garréta’s work revolves around dismantling any reflexes we might have, as writers and readers. She roots her intellectualized reflections on desire into the concrete experience of desire, showing how we are simultaneously living and narrating ourselves at the time, and what kind of fictions underpin this constant dynamic.” — A.K. Afferez, Ploughshares

“What is so extraordinary about Garréta’s take on the confessional is the way her formidable intellect braids eros and philosophy together: the women are (di)splayed in alphabetically-ordered vignettes written—and translated—with breathtaking precision and bite. The lovers, for the most part, slip intentionally out of focus, but the desire (or in some cases, the lack thereof) that drives each encounter is always drawn with the clearest of lines. It is ultimately this desire, and the act of remembering, itself, that seem to be the true protagonists of this indispensable, bracing parade. From B*, with her “sensual proclivity for analysis,” to D*, a “typically desirable woman, you saw her in and through the eyes of others,” and H*, “a siren fastened to her chosen rock,” the accumulation pushes us toward the conclusion that the discovery of the other is always also, or perhaps only, a discovery of oneself.” —Heather Cleary, Book Marks

"It will not go where readers expect, and that imbalance is part of the structure of the entire narrative. It is also for those who relish language, particularly the way words can build a foundation for trust, can intimate the unspoken, and can leave you reeling." —Nadia M Sahi, Rainbow Round Table Reviews

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