I meet the anonymous co-founder of Les Fugitives in a bar so discreet that its name isn’t on the sign. Piercing the many postmodern layers of artfulness and self-reflexiveness in the novel is a hard core of painful realism all of the women, from the author/narrator to the actress/director to the inspiration/criminal, are haunted by male violence in the form of abusive fathers, husbands, boyfriends or seemingly good Samaritans who turned out to be anything but. So begins a gripping boxes-within-boxes narrative as Leger (or her semi-fictionalised avatar) follows Loden following Wanda following Alma Malone, the woman the film Wanda is based on. The narrator is enthralled by Loden’s 1970 directorial masterpiece, Wanda, which tells the – again true-life – story of a woman who collaborated with a stranger to rob a bank. Suite for Barbara Loden tells the story of an unnamed French writer and archivist, possibly based on Léger herself, writing an encyclopaedia entry on real-life American film director and actor Barbara Loden.
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