From the award-winning and best-selling French author, a woman personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love and swimming In “Seventeen,” “Friendship,” and “Swimming,” Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.; Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing or the nuance of a long friendship or a mid-life romance. <Swimming in Paris <is an immersive, propulsive triptych--fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.

Auteur

Colombe Schneck, translated by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer

Texte du rabat

"A woman's personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming"--

Résumé
**A Natalie Portman Book Club Pick

From the award-winning and bestselling French author Colombe Schneck, a woman’s personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming

At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself.

In Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming, Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.

Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych—fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.

Échantillon de lecture
SEVENTEEN

I never told anyone what happened to me in the spring of 1984. Not my ex-husband and children, or my closest friends. The shame, the embarrassment, the sadness-

I never told anyone how I accidentally became an adult.

Last year, in an interview with the daily newspaper L'Humanité, Annie Ernaux recalled that "a solitude without limits surrounds women who get abortions."

She experienced this solitude in 1964. She was twenty-three years old. At the time, abortion was a crime punishable by law. She describes looking through libraries for books in which the heroine wants to terminate a pregnancy. She was hoping to find companionship in literature; she found nothing. In novels, the heroine was pregnant, and then she wasn't anymore; the passage between these two states was an ellipsis. The card catalog entry for "Abortion" at the library only listed scientific or legal journals, addressing the subject as a matter for criminal justice.

She felt even more resolutely cast back into her solitude, reduced to her social condition. Illegal abortion, in all its physical and moral brutality, was at that time a matter of obscure local rumor.

Even if today abortion is protected by law in France, it still exists on the margins of literature.

When, in 2000, Annie Ernaux published Happening (L'Événement), a narrative about a clandestine abortion before the Veil Law (which legalized abortion in France), the book didn't make much of an impact. It was an upsetting story. A journalist dealt the following blow to her: "your book made me nauseous."

Abortion isn't a subject worthy of literature.

It's a war you come through, somewhere between life and death, humiliation, disapproval, and regret.

No, it isn't a worthy subject.

I listened to Annie Ernaux. What she said about silence, about embarrassment, about how "women can take nothing for granted" yet they "do not mobilize enough."

At a time when, here in Europe, legislation on the voluntary termination of a pregnancy is constantly called into question, when we hear about abortion becoming "banal," when some people even go so far as to invent something called a "convenient abortion," I find that I have to tell the story of my own "happening": what it meant, and continues to mean.

Neither banal, nor convenient.

I have no choice; I have to talk about what happened in the spring of 1984.

I'm seventeen years old and I have a lover. I'm not in love but I have a lover. I sing as I cross the Boulevard Saint-Michel, I'm seventeen years old and I have a lover, and I am very happy. I am not like my mother, I am not her loneliness. I am myself, a girl who's sleeping with a boy without being in love with him. I am seventeen years old and I have a lover. Not a boyfriend, not a sweetheart, not some adolescent crush, a lover, something grown women have.

I am an independent woman.

It is 1984. The Left is in power. The death penalty has been abolished, the Fête de la musique has been invented, and the compact disc, they promise, cannot be broken. The prime minister is thirty-eight years old, AIDS is, to me, a disease at once threatening and far away, the feminist revolution has ended in triumph. On television, we watch and listen to Apostrophes, Droit de réponse, and Claude-Jean Philippe's film club. We are all intelligent and modern.

As I write this today, that world, which I thought indestructible, has ceased to exist. Comfort, parents, support, optimism, faith in power and in the women and men who embody it-all of it, gone.

My lover is a boy in my class. His name is Vincent, he lives on the Right Bank. He's tall, with tortoiseshell glasses. He's cute and he has a scooter. I'm not in love with him but I like him a lot.

I was the one who chose him. During this time, I am in charge of these things. I decide, I designate. Everything is so easy. I don't have to ask my parents' permission to stay overnight at his house, or to spend the weekend there.

I'm not afraid, I've read so many erotic scenes in books, I'm hungry to experience the gestures and sensations that so fascinate me on paper. Will it all be as arousing, luminous, and exciting as it is in books? I read and reread Emmanuelle: "If she resisted, it was only the better to taste, bit by bit, the delights of letting herself go [. . .] the man's hand did not move. Using only its weight, it applied pressure to her clitoris [. . .] Emmanuelle felt a strange exaltation go up her arms, down her bare stomach, in her throat. A previously-unknown feeling of grey took hold of her." Could it be that good?

We don't have as much experience with other people's bodies, we aren't lounging in first class on a flight from Paris to Bangkok, I'm not wearing nylon stockings or silk underpants, the hand on me isn't a stranger's but a classmate's. We are in a seventeen-year-old boy's narrow bed, in a room that still bears the traces of childhood-a map of the world, a Snoopy poster, a plaid throw. I want nothing more than that, and him.

I don't tell him that he is my first, I don't want him to feel he has to be careful, or for him to think I'm inexperienced, or a prude. He is just the first of many, I hope. I make up some story about having been with an older man, but he is the man from Emmanuelle's plane, an American who barely speaks French.

We quickly learn to touch like they do aboard the flight from Paris to Bangkok…