Panics
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A haunting, bizarre short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience.
A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (1921–1986) wrote and wrote feverishly, but only managed to publish one book in her lifetime: the surreal, nightmarish collection Panics.
These thirteen stories beat with a frantic, off-kilter rhythm as Molinard obsesses over sickness, death, and control. A woman becomes transfixed by a boa constrictor at her local zoo, mysterious surgeons dismember their patient, and the author narrates to Duras how she was stopped from sleeping in a cemetery vault, only to be haunted by the pain of sleeping on its stone floor.
In the unsettling tradition of Franz Kafka, Djuna Barnes, Leonara Carrington, and more, Panics recovers the work of a tormented writer who often destroyed her writing as soon as she produced it, and whose insights into violence, mental illness, and bodily autonomy are simultaneously absurdist and razor-sharp.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Molinard's startling and surreal collection, first published in France in 1969, presents the pitfalls of mental illness in a world made foreign. Prolific yet terrorized by self-doubt, Molinard (1921–1986) destroyed everything she ever wrote, save for the stories preserved by her husband as well as her friend Marguerite Duras, who contributed an introduction. The opener, "The Plane from Santa Rosa," sets the tone with a woman traveling around a city killing time before a flight, window shopping and making chit-chat with clerks. In "Come," an unnamed narrator sits in a train station and struggles to write a travelogue that might be entirely imagined. A section titled "Untitled" consists of various fragments. "Taxi" echoes many of the recurring themes Molinard uses to explore displacement, depression, and despair; in it, a man who doesn't remember getting in a taxi observes the world as it rolls past his window. The collection ends with "The Vault," in which Duras and Molinard have a conversation wherein the author explains her desire to live in a windowless darkened vault, away from all of society. Her writing often reads like a diary, churning with a force driven by illusory sadness. Ramadan's translation is a great gift to readers.
