Swimming in Paris
A Life in Three Stories
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Natalie Portman Book Club Pick
“Sinewy, tough, sharp . . . Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.” —Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French author Schneck's beautiful English-language debut traces the development of her central character, also named Colombe, through childhood, adolescence, and mature womanhood. In the first of three sections, set in 1984, Colombe accidently gets pregnant at 17 by her first lover, a boy in her class named Vincent, and faces personal fallout after having an abortion. The second part focuses on Colombe and her best friend Héloïse as they come of age in Paris. Héloïse is from old French money; Colombe, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the daughter of left-wing doctors, is nouveau riche. In a depiction emblematic of the bourgeois liberalism of those born in the wake of the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris, the girls are taken by their families to the opera and attend classes to perfect their British accents and their tennis strokes; they never go to shopping malls or borrow books from the library. In the final section, set in 2020, Colombe undertakes a heartfelt examination of the great love affair she's recently had with a man named Gabriel, whom she met when they were children, and of how perfecting her swim strokes allows her to release her fear of life's uncertainties. This is a gorgeous meditation on the vagaries of being alive.
