Author(s): Jacqueline Harpman

Novel | Translated fiction | France | LGBTQI+

"A magical novel on the theme of androgyny. Funny, subtle, poignant..." - Nadine Sautel, Magazine litteraire

"Jacqueline Harpman drags us into one of those sexual phantasmagorias that are her own secret. She displays incredible confidence in juggling identities and meshing together yearnings and phobias, fantasies and frustrations" - T G, L'Express

How would it be to jump into the skin of another? To be both a man and a woman at once? And what would happen if you found yourself attracted to yourself?

Beneath a mousy exterior, 35-year-old college lecturer Aline seethes with frustration. Sick of being bullied by her mother and treated like a piece of furniture by Albert, her live-in lover, one day Aline leaps from her own skin into the far more attractive body of Lucien, whom she spots in a cafe at the Gare du Nord. From here this brilliantly imaginative story runs on parallel lines. While Aline sensibly catches the train back to her orderly life, Aline-Lucien - or Orlanda, as her bold new composite self is called in homage to Virginia Woolf - follows, dragging chaos in his wake.

Jacqueline Harpman, herself once a psychoanalyst, revels in the confusion, as ego falls for alter ego and mothers, sisters and lovers begin to ask awkward questions in this unusual perceptive comedy of double selves and bisexuality.

"Undoubtedly this is a novel to breathe life into characters through the unfettered use of the imagination. It offers a pretext for a great deal of humour and fantasy that stirs up the old myths' - Andre Brincourt, Figaro

Winner of the Prix Medicis.

Author Biography: JACQUELINE HARPMAN was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929. Being half Jewish, the family moved to Casablanca when the Nazis invaded, and returned home after the war. After studying French literature she started training to be a doctor, but could not complete her medical studies when she contracted tuberculosis. She turned to writing in 1954 and her first work was published in 1958. In 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. She had given up her writing after her fourth book was published, and resumed her career as a novelist only some twenty years later. She has written twelve novels and won several literary prizes. She is married to an architect and has two children. Reviewing her novel, The Mistress of Silence, a haunting, Kafkaeque story, Pierre Maury in Le Soir called it "the product of a fertile imagination that succeeds in setting before us a world totally alien from the one to which we have been accustomed".

ROS SCHWARTZ, who has translated fiction by such authors as Ousmane Sembene, Andree Chedid and Sebastien Japrisot as well as many works of non-fiction, has been a full-time translator since 1982. She ran translation workshops at Goldsmith's College, London University, and teaches on the part-time MA course in translation studies at Middlesex University.