Satris on Edouard Levé at Two Lines Press

NB: From time to time here on The Ampersand blog, we'll be sharing news of interest to readers of our special-interest journals and series: Pusteblume, translation; Sixty-Six, sonnets and sonnetry; Hawk & Whippoorwill, literature of "man and nature"; WTT, for World Theatre in Translation; Decameron, "quite short" fiction and other micro-genres; and so on. For this inaugural post, we'd like to draw attention to an item, over at the Two Lines Press blog, of interest to translators, to readers of French literature, and Oulipo enthusiasts. - ZB

In advance of an "all-Levé" event at The Lab this week, Marthine Satris writes about her experience with Levé’s fascinating Autoportrait, and connects the dots between Levé and Georges Perec:

When I read Levé’s Autoportrait [translated by Lorin Stein], I had a sense that his self-scrutiny was a project composed in response to the contemporary fascination with memoir and true stories. Then, Scott pointed out that the opening sentence of Levé’s book, “When I was young, I thought Life A User’s Manual would teach me how to live…,” referred to the Oulipan Georges Perec’s most famous novel. This made me think about the influence that the Oulipo had on him, particularly its charge to write within constraint.

Read more about Satris's delvings into Levé at the website of Two Lines Press.