Black Forest
A man decides he is old enough. A woman returns early from a lovers' retreat to a bottle of pills at home. And how should you explain the nuances of contemporary Paris to your mother, twenty - five years dead? Valerie Mr ejen 's Black Forest is a book of mourning that isn ' t morbid or sentimental, but rather an elegant and wryly humorous brace against the void. With a paradoxically detached intimacy, Mr ejen follows death's dark and twisted path through the lives it touches, wringing out every possible meaning-or non-meaning- along the way. A writer at the height of her career who draws comparisons to Georges Perec and Nathalie Sarraute, Mr ejen has cemented her status as an auteur with a singular voice, guiding us through the Black Forest of ghosts that populate her subconscious.
Valérie Mréjen (b. 1969) is a writer, filmmaker, and mixed media artist. She has written five novels, most recently Troisième personne (2017 ), and exhibited widely in France and abroad, including in a solo retrospective at the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris. She is an alumna of residencies at Villa Medici in Rome and Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. Mréjen's first feature–length film, En ville, co–directed with Bertrand Schefer, was a Director's Fortnight selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, and her children's play, Trois Hommes Verts, premiered at the Théâtre Gennevilliers in 2014. More information, including many of her films, can be found online at http://valeriemrejen.com/folio.
Katie Shireen Assef is a literary translator living between Los Angeles and Arles, France. Black Forest is her first full –length translation.
