The Governesses
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Publishers Weekly Best Books in Fiction 2018
The sensational US debut of a major French writer—an intense, delicious meringue of a novella
In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.”
Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Serre's first work to be translated into English is a hypnotic tale of three governesses and the sensuous education they provide. Roaming the country estate of a staid married couple, Monsieur and Madame Austeur, In s, Laura, and El onore are not exactly Jane Eyre types. Prone to Dionysian frenzies, they lounge naked in the sun or bound about like deer. Should any passerby fall "into the trap of their vast, lunar privacy," they pounce upon, seduce, and devour him ("in a ladylike manner") to sate their ungovernable desires. This could be the setup for a neo-pagan farce about the battle between Eros and civilization, but as Serre delves into the three women's existence, the novel taps into deeper, quieter waters: the Keatsian twinning of joy and melancholy. "It was life itself advancing," Monsieur Austeur thinks upon witnessing the governess's mysterious arrival, while sensing that each of these hedonistic women harbors an unknowable secret and ineradicable sadness. He provides a sense of order to counterbalance their chaos, and indeed, the same could be said about the work's steely prose. On the neighboring estate, an old, solitary man watches the voluptuous displays through a telescope, his omnipresent gaze at once leering, reverent and affirming. Serre's wistful ode to pleasure is as enchanting as its three nymph-like protagonists.
