December 1, 2023
Reverberating across three stories, Schneck, a best-selling award winner in France, intimately surveys the world of a fiftysomething woman looking at her life at 17, at 50, and in between. As the woman reflects, Schneck explores a kaleidoscope of concerns, from bodily autonomy to love to loss. Prepub Alert.
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February 15, 2024
Schneck's Swimming in Paris is a brilliantly written, searingly intimate piece of biographical fiction, the story of a woman experiencing all of life. At 17, she is lucky and na�ve, skating through life and refusing to acknowledge the undercurrents of past trauma and present pain. When she becomes pregnant, her life begins to change. Always fighting for control, she begins to wrestle with what being a woman really means. In her late forties and early fifties, Schneck grapples with the loss of her best friend, and later, Schneck begins to swim in the public pool and learns to love herself and life, in all its flawed and uncontrollable, soft glory. Schneck writes of herself at 17, at 30, at 40, at 50 and beyond with an understanding that is enviable. She unhesitatingly invites the reader into her blunt, beautiful, sometimes terrible thoughts, taking us through her triumphs and losses, and in the end reveals an unparalleled strength and empathy for herself as a woman, a friend, a lover, and a writer.
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Starred review from March 11, 2024
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. Agent: Susanna Lea, Susanna Lea Assoc.
March 15, 2024
Insight into a Frenchwoman's life from the woman who lived it. Colombe Schneck, the narrator of each of these three assembled novellas, engages in a careful dissection of various stages of her life. That the book's author is also named Colombe Schneck provides some clue as to how close to the bone Schneck is cutting here. In Seventeen, she parses the inevitability of biology and the shock of betrayal by one's own body (and the results of an unplanned teen pregnancy). Friendship explores a lifelong friendship between Colombe and H�lo�se, allowing Schneck to examine, in subtle detail, the ethnic, class, and political differences between bourgeois households during the girls' formative years in 1970s and '80s Paris. A different kind of bodily betrayal is visited upon H�lo�se in the account. Schneck's last remembrance, Swimming: A Love Story, recounts an affair Colombe embarks on after a season of romantic disenchantment. Among the other gifts Gabriel bestows upon her during the course of their relationship is an awareness of her body (and the development of a sense of autonomy over it). Repeatedly, the inevitability of life's unpredictability is made clear to Colombe, but it is only with later-acquired self-awareness that she is able to continue in the face of her doubts and emotional discomfort. Translated from French by Elkin and Lehrer, Schneck's matter-of-fact delivery of all aspects of her lived experiences--from a comparison of the Parisian apartments favored by the bourgeoisie to her panic at uncertainty--lends a universal quality to the narrative; these observations made by one woman are broadly recognizable. Acknowledging the influence of Annie Erneaux on her thinking and her ability to write about issues intensely personal to women, Schneck carries that frank discussion forward with grace and hard-won knowledge. No pulled punches here, just truth.
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