Hélène Bessette’s 1953 Lili is Crying: discovering a lost masterpiece, a writer who should be alongside Ernaux, Bachmann, Hardwick—in a gorgeous translation by Kate Briggs for 4Columns

Opening Hélène Bessette’s 1953 Lili is Crying felt like discovering a lost masterpiece, a writer who should be in my canon alongside Annie Ernaux, Ingborg Bachmann, Elizabeth Hardwick, Chris Kraus, and Lynne Tillman—in a gorgeous translation by Kate Briggs. Bessette called her novel the “roman poetique” and it comes shattered lines, breaks that move briskly through time. Read more at 4Columns or below:

For nearly one hundred pages, the novel is set in a fable-like world beyond any particular year or era. Then, under the heading “THE VERB TO CHOOSE,” like some superscript in a Godard film, Lili’s context comes clear: capitalism and genocide. Asked to decide between her husband and mother, Lili calls out the false choices capitalism requires so that people—women—think they are free:

Show me a woman who’s chosen something.
Some women choose one fabric over another, but fabrics fade and market sellers keep selling just so that women can tell themselves they’ve made a choice in their lives.

By the end of the page, the choice is made for her by war, which sounds like capitalism, too:

They all knew that war had been declared, a new kind of war, patent pending.
Everyone knew that deportation had been invented, a new make of deportation, patent pending.
And barbed wire,
a new style of barbed wire;
. . .
a new god,
a peerless new model
beating all the competition.