"The Paris Trilogy" by Colombe Schneck is a captivating and evocative exploration of love, identity, and the complex beauty of life in Paris. Schneck’s writing is richly atmospheric, immersing readers in the vibrant streets and hidden corners of the city. Through her three interconnected stories, she masterfully weaves together themes of passion, loss, and the search for meaning in a world that is both romantic and unforgiving. The characters are deeply human, their struggles and desires poignantly portrayed with sensitivity and insight. "The Paris Trilogy" is a beautifully crafted literary work that captures the essence of Paris and the intricacies of the human heart, making it a must-read for lovers of thoughtful and evocative fiction.

The Paris Trilogy
By Colombe Schneck

In three semi autobiographical essays the author, a Parisienne born in 1966, delves into what it means to inhabit a female body, her relationship with the world and it's hostility to the female gender and the complexities of her relationships with family, a female friend, a doomed love affair and ultimately her relationship with herself.

In "Seventeen" she describes her visceral shock as her body betrays her notions that the world is her oyster, an pregnancy bringing her sense of freedom and possibility crashing down.

In "Friendship" she begins in media res, with a coffee date with her lifelong best friend, who is revealed to have terminal cancer, before reverting to a more linear narrative, beginning with the day they met as children, and their love, their bourgeois upbringing, their life trajectories, their envies, how intrisic they were to each other's lives and then the dreadful day that disease changed all their lives.

In "Swimming: A Love Story", she speaks with open honesty about a relationship where she learns to use her body, take control and love herself.

Schneck's style has been compared to that of Annie Ernaux, and it's easy to see why, but something about her time frame and more contemporary dialect makes this a much more appealing read. She deals with hard topics such as abortion, cancer and death, loss of identity through marriage and motherhood, adultery and divorce, but her precision of prose, her self awareness and her witty self depreciating tone reveal the humanity in the awful way we sometimes behave.

This book was translated from the French by Lauren Elkin, who's own novel "Scaffolding" I am currently reading. I am astonished at how well she preserved the sparcity of the original text and "frenchness" of style.

Publication Date: 19th June 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #simonschusteruk for the ARC

I absolutely adored this book. It's written with great style and the author knows how to interweave her biography while still creating a character within the collection. Each short novella deals with a different autobiographical moment though the illness of one of her oldest friends is the central thread that runs through this piece. It's a brilliant condensing of a life into small yet precise moments that you give you a complete picture of the world that the characters inhabit, the great loves and losses of their lives and all with a great philosophical French shrug. It's intelligent and intellectual without being pretentious and self-dissecting without being self-pitying. There's a glamour to the style and the world created that is just unbearably chic.

Colombe Scheneck is an intense narrator who impatiently reveals everything about herself to the reader, including her hidden and still-healing scars.

These three pieces of autofiction are very clearly in dialogue with [author:Annie Ernaux|56176] as acknowledged by the author at the start of Seventeen/[book:Dix-sept ans|24338579].

The first piece on having an abortion and the long emotional aftermath also, though, highlights the differences from Ernaux's experience: the narrator here is living in Paris in the 1980s, is the privileged daughter of left-wing doctors, and doesn't experience that shame which is such a driver from Ernaux's working-class background to her writing. Nevertheless, the event is no less foundational here, reverberating as an echoing sense of absence and loss through a life.

The second piece, Friendship in this English translation, rather than the more clarifying [book:Deux petites bourgeoises|57946599] in the original feels particularly Gallic as it traces the lives of two bourgeois women in a tradition that certainly encompasses, if it doesn't spring from, [book:Madame Bovary|60694].

The third piece, Swimming: A Love Story/[book:La tendresse du crawl|44291454], is perhaps the most sophisticated as the older narrator comes to terms with her expectations and experiences of love.

What holds all three pieces together is an acute engagement with what it means to live inside a female body: teenage confidence and unassailability are punctured by the biology of pregnancy; bourgeois comfort cannot hold back the ravages of life or cancer; and, finally, a form of freedom and self-love come, unexpectedly, from swimming: 'I was completely inhabiting my body, it was an entirely unfamiliar freedom, bodily freedom, rapture, a sensuality that I alone was responsible for'.

This may not be as literally and intellectually sophisticated as Ernaux's work or as expansive as Deborah Levy's 'living autobiography' books, but this adds a Parisian slant to our growing shelf of what it means to live bodily as a woman at the turn of the twentieth/twenty first centuries.

In The Paris Trilogy Colombe Schneck explores growing up, womanhood, friendships, relationships, mortality and bereavement.