Suzanne
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3.8 • 25 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Eighty-five years of art and history through the eyes of a woman who fled her family – as re-imagined by her granddaughter.
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her mother’s mother. Curious to understand why her grandmother, Suzanne, a sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes, a movement of dissident artists that included Paul-Émile Borduas, abandoned her husband and young family, Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together Suzanne’s life.
Suzanne, winner of the Prix des libraires du Québec and a bestseller in French, is a fictionalized account of Suzanne’s life over eighty-five years, from Montreal to New York to Brussels, from lover to lover, through an abortion, alcoholism, Buddhism, and an asylum. It takes readers through the Great Depression, Québec's Quiet Revolution, women’s liberation, and the American civil rights movement, offering a portrait of a volatile, fascinating woman on the margins of history. And it’s a granddaughter’s search for a past for herself, for understanding and forgiveness.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When, as an adult, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette decides to try to piece together the life of a grandmother she never knew, she uncovers a world ripe with stories. Hiring a private investigator, she starts to explore why her mother’s mother, Suzanne, abandoned her family, and she then uses the detective’s discoveries to spin an account of Suzanne’s life. Originally published in French, Suzanne is fiction that’s informed by truth—an attempt to give a face to an absent presence. We were swept up in the book’s beautiful and poetic ambiguity.
