Voice Over: A Novel

by Celine Curiol, Sam Richard (Translator), Paul Auster (Foreword by)

Overview

Finalist for Best Translated Book of 2008 by the Hermeneutic Circle

French Voices Award

A lonely young woman works as an announcer in Paris's gare du Nord train station. Obsessed with a man attached to another woman, she wanders through the world of dinner parties, shopping excursions, and chance sexual encounters with a sense of haunting expectation. As something begins to happen between her and the man she loves, she finds herself at a crossroads, pitting her desire against her sanity. This smashing debut novel sparkles with mordant humor and sexy charm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583229798
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	01/04/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	475 KB

About the Author

CÉLINE CURIOL is a journalist who has worked for various French media, including Libération, Radio France, and BBC Afrique. Her second novel and a travel book on Sierra Leone have recently been published in France. Originally from Lyon, Curiol lives in New York City, where she is at work on her
third novel.

Editorial Reviews

What Curiol, in this translation by Sam Richard, does so marvelously well is render this stream of thought and feeling into words on a page.
—The New York Times

Alison McCulloch

In French journalist Curiol's mesmerizing debut novel, an unnamed young woman drifts, solitary and aimless, through contemporary Paris. She works as an announcer at a train station and is in love with a man who lives with another woman. Her longing to connect with others and dismaying inability to assert herself leaves the protagonist vulnerable to approaches by strangers with doubtful intentions, and she finds herself in a number of sordid and perilous encounters (a one-night stand with a transvestite, trouble with a drug dealer). The sparely plotted novel takes some surprising turns toward the end, as the protagonist and her beloved tentatively become involved, and she reveals to him the roots of her emotional fragility. The novel broods in a classically French way, and the bleak meanderings are beautifully wrought. The ending is, of course, a downer, but it's earned and powerful. (Sept.)

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Publishers Weekly

Not only is it the finest first novel I have read in many years, but it is, quite simply, one of the most original and brilliantly executed works of fiction by any contemporary writer I know of.” –Paul Auster


“Recalls the most disturbing moments in Marguerite Duras's work … [A] strange, sinister and compelling novel.” –Financial Times


“An infrared view of Sex and the City, a snapshot plunged in an acrid bath.” –Globe and Mail


“With an extraordinary sense of the mechanisms of love and the empathy of a saint for the human race, Céline Curiol gives us the most original and the best new book of the year.” –Marie Claire


“The product of exquisite craft … it manages to be technically accomplished while being technically daring.” –Women's Review of Books

From the Publisher