Liliane Giraudon – Detached but descriptive, enigmatic but banal: verbal assemblage of fragments, torn images and detritus

Liliane Giraudon, Love Is Colder Than the

Lake, Trans. by Sarah Riggs and Lindsay

Turner. Nightboat Books, 2024

Searing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon’s power and range.

Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon’s own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon’s writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.

"Over the course of her long and varied career, Liliane Giraudon has proven to be one of the most singular voices of the twentieth century, taking on the still-unanswered questions that have marked our time. Her work relentlessly deconstructs dominant representations, addresses itself to issues of gender and class, and investigates the political and philosophical implications of these issues, which also provide the particular form for her texts. That form is at the heart of an inclusive, multiple aesthetic, incorporating a wide range of materials and artistic practices: collage, drawing, documentary, citation, notetaking, photography, and performance." ―Amandine André

"For more than four decades, the French poet Liliane Giraudon has written experimental, sensual, and politically demanding work. . . [Love is Colder Than the Lake] offers an opportunity to delve into the long and rich career of this exceptional poet."—Léon Pradeau, Poetry Foundation

"This collection of rueful, frank, breezily wanton love poems by a notable contemporary French poet has almos none of the hiccups and irregularities one expects from a translated work. (The original French isn’t provided, so it’s unclear what liberties Turner is taking, but whatever they are, she should keep taking them.)" ―David Orr, The New York Times

"[Giraudon’s] voice is hypnotic, inscrutable, unique. A trip through one of her narratives is like a somnambular stroll through a rain-soaked ravine with an unreadable road map; a ramble in fugue-state through a wilderness where signposts are written in the language of emotion and the logic of the heart." —Gilbert Albert-Gilbert

“For half a century, Giraudon’s incisive brilliance has driven French poetry forward. Here, she investigates the work of art in an age of global deperdition. Banalities stumble into horror. Text, collage, and film bottom out into their constitutive unknowns. And ghosts including Fassbinder, Niedecker, and Maier compel us to look the Real in the eye. Riggs and Turner match Giraudon’s pace and polyphony and affirm that poetry is the mode of perception we need now.” —Teresa Villa-Ignacio

“Vivid and flickering, this book by the leading light of contemporary experimental feminist poetics, Liliane Giraudon, is a live stream of striking images, both cinematic and hypnotizing. As it progresses, the recurrent image of the lake accumulates greater and greater charge as its possibilities, metaphoric, symbolic, and literal, proliferate. Giraudon grapples here with the tremendous weight of history in its many theaters, again both literal and figurative. The cast of characters is epic, the logic, poetic, and the whole, riveting. Riggs’ and Turner’s translation is as inventive as the work itself, perfectly capturing all its urgency, wry wit, and sharp perceptions—a remarkable feat.” —Cole Swensen

“A propulsive pastiche of ‘accumulated ghosts’ that shows that when ‘the grotesque has overcome all the rest,’ we can dig our way out through language, image, each other. An exploration of the past selves we are constructed on, and a cinematic, surprising staging of grief and lost love rendered electrically and filled with pleasing pops of ‘shrimp-pink’ and ‘crushing fierce yellows’ by translator-poet duo Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner who deftly braid together words of the English language to make a new one for Liliane Giraudon.” —Emma Ramadan

Caught between the allure of the femme fatale on screen and her misrepresented agency, how does a female artist re-embrace her role as a poetess after years away from writing poetry? In Love is Colder than the Lake, Liliane Giraudon sets out on an experimental expedition wielding her anarcho-queer pen, capturing instant Polaroids of life’s intricacies and violence. Her writing engages with these snapshots, gradually peeling away layers of silver halide to distill her final image — the metaphorical lake, a repository of her intellect. With candidness, Giraudon positions herself as an assistant, an imposter adopting the title of German director Rainer Fassbinder’s debut feature Love is Colder than Death. Through this title and a fusion of film screenshots and prose in the book’s concluding section, she pays homage to Dadaist works that have long inspired her, creating an “impure” book that deviates from conventional forms, as described in an interview.

Quoting Jacques Lacan and Fernand Deligny in the epigraphs, Giraudon constructs a dreamlike space intersecting film scenes, pouring in ghosts of preceding artists and characters, who are reshaped with a magical essence. One example would be the photographer Vivian Maier, whose hidden lifestyle is redefined as that of an androgynous spy. Under Giraudon’s pen, the spy attempts to reclaim her public identity beyond being labeled solely as a career nanny through underdeveloped negatives and repetitive self portraits.

Giraudon subverts literary conventions in a captivatingly revolutionary manner, infusing her work with a cinematic touch on the filth and defiled desires of a female protagonist. Her narrative balances poetic collage with the emergent voice of a female poet, portrayed as a stage actress wandering within italicized interludes. This actress moves around in a precisely “atmospheric pain,” where death looms in the backdrop, as established in the epigraph of the first section. Then, the stage actress morphs into a beast, alongside transformed angels and Furies. Regardless of her portrayal on the silver screen — be it as an elderly figure or an enticing blonde — her artistic mission is to provoke the audience, spinning a revolutionary trajectory from this defiance.

Throughout the poetry, Giraudon also traverses themes of blood, excrement, disease, and death, seeking to unveil a desolate world where women endure mistreatment and rarely find room for resistance. To illustrate this, Giraudon employs condensed imagery resembling film shots, constructing meanings within their collective assemblage. The recurring presence of masculine ghosts, such as the bourgeois Faust or the manipulative Orpheus, accentuates the erasure of female literary voices. Giraudon parallels the abused and involuntarily removed women with fundamental language units, operating automatically at a loss. She underscores the “brief syntaxes perspectives / slow mobile excavations / but we advance vertical / depth something thick / not really / black atlas of use.” While patriarchal figures and the relentless capitalist market diminish the essence and potency of poetry, Giraudon encourages female artists to redefine words and sentences, revealing the faults of men and the forcefulness of female power, motion, and rage.

Yes, she says, blame the woe of ancient Greek women characters on Hector and Achilles’ genital fractures. Blame it all on Euripides and Virgil’s silence on these dysfunctions. Giraudon provocatively exposes how the cruelty and destructiveness of love foster not harmony, but a violent clash between masculine and feminine entities. Purposefully distancing herself from the male-dominated literary canon and a misogynistic societal environment, she employs Brecht and Poussi’s tools to emphasize her divergence, stating, “Love will wait / like all assassins / it knows its time / the eye of the lake decomposes / it’s a paradigm.” By establishing a dual relationship between the love and the lake, she elevates the lake to the central protagonist in experimental theater — a female killer responsible for a scene reminiscent of the chaos depicted in Naked Lunch, leaving the male director and other bodies strewn in its wake.How does the lake come into being? Giraudon unfolds the significance of the lake in the final section of her work, where she lays bare her artist statement, recollecting the narrator’s sexual frustration akin to that of the main actress in a Fassbinder film. She invokes the spirits of Russian writers and the character Treplev from Chehov’s The Seagull, exploring women’s survival without love, or in the aftermath of love that has been lost. Giraudon perceives the lake as not only a repository of literary ghosts but also a life source confronting an intimate yet forgotten past. For her, the survival of the unloved culminates in the ultimate contact with the lake depicted within a wasteland-like world in the book. While the paper form provides no shelter, the imagined lake offers solace.

In Love is Colder than the Lake, Giraudon weaves an intricate tapestry of captivating imagery, interlacing fragmented moments of personal trauma and echoing a multilayered history through literal and figurative predecessors spanning from Andromache to Lorine Niedecker and Emma Goldman. Giraudon is explicit about her stance as a poet relying on literary history and the boundaries of her text, which she frequently underscores in the appendix, playfully naming the characters alongside their authorship or lifespan. The only flaw of this work arises in the second section of the book, where pieces of poetry from the first section are rearranged in different directions on the page. This repetition, rather than creating a further evolution of perspectives, results in a redundancy that fails to build upon the thematic depth of “fusion” and “confusion” established in the prior section.

Giraudon’s poetry emerges from the imagined war and death in a dissoluted global world, which represents the poet’s struggle to confront the violence women experience in everyday life. Employing a pointillistic writing style, Liliane delves into the “damn spot” that Lady Macbeth grapples with, exploring the pains of everyday life. However, she does not confine herself to autobiographical themes or solely express the love and hurt experienced by women. Instead, Giraudon stages a parade of wandering literary ghosts, and argues for the reevaluation of female artists and characters, all while examining the conflicting dynamics between deceased love, the culminating lake, and the forms and acts of writing. It’s through this lens that the female form achieves autonomy.

One of the outstanding lines in this work of poetry speaks about the desiredatives licking things raw, as “they bite and they chew / so that the bite become / visible on the flesh of the passersby.” Giraudon’s book as such encapsulates feminine desire within its vicious howling and drooling, highlighting the power of words as muscles, enabling the assistant (the central female voice) to physically reclaim the center stage from the male. - Lucia Tian

https://c-j-l-c.org/portfolio/poetic-depths-liliane-giraudons-love-is-colder-than-the-lake/

Liliane Giraudon, Fur , Trans. by Guy Bennett, Sun & Moon Press, 2002

"The first few stories in here just kind of floated past my subconscious when I read them, but as soon as I hit “The Complex” (I think that’s the title? Book’s at home, I’m bad with titles, will check when I get there) I became so fully engrossed that I could barely pause between stories. Giraudon writes with a very strange tone– it’s distanced, but emotional and hyper-present at the same time, detached but descriptive, enigmatic but banal. For some reason I kept thinking of apocryphal author Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta’s collection The Eyes, but probably only because it was another totally alien short story collection that sucked me in slowly.
I think I need to read this again, and soon, at least some of the stories, because it’s so alien but beautiful, really great. – Mike Kitchell

„The first thing that strikes the reader of the fiction of Liliane Giraudon is that she doesn't write like anyone else. Her voice is hypnotic, inscrutable, unique. A trip through one of her narratives is like a somnambular stroll through a rain-soaked ravine with an unreadable road map; a ramble in fugue-state through a wilderness where signposts are written in the language of emotion and the logic of the heart. FUR is a book of disturbing beauty reverberant with endless mystery.“ – review @ Amazon.com

Poem "My Beckett"

Jeanette Gaudet: Writing Otherwise: Atlan, Duras, Giraudon, Redonnet, and Wittig


Liliane Giraudon, Pallaksch, Pallaksch, Trans. By Julia Hine, Sun & Moon Press, 2000


"Odd little prose pieces. Not really stories at all, but character pieces. Lovely and strange, like the one about a woman who wears cherry print tights." – Scott @ goodreads

"Evocative tales about grotesque characters (located on the Atlantic Coast of France?) who find beauty in rather horrific acts." – J.d. @ goodreads