Overview
"As an entomologist of the ways of love, [Dorner] has a rare precision . . . we devour her book, realizing that it shows the building and the destruction of a couple carried away by work and day-to-day concerns. Her story is our own, and that is why we love it."
-Paris Match
To save our marriage I tried offering him another woman. He has started fantasizing about her. He doesn't know it's me . . . and she is now destroying us.
Nina and Roger have a humdrum marriage, not helped by the pressures of their work running a newspaper kiosk on the shaded side of a busy street in Paris. Shuttling between her straight-laced husband, her selfish mother, the father she has never known, and her best friend who has—inconveniently—just split up with her brother-in-law, Nina decides one day to leaf through the girlie magazines she sells every day. She glimpses a world of pleasure and desire, and innocently believes she has found a way of rekindling something that may never have been there. As she explores her own longings and discovers how attractive she is to other men, how can she fail to win back the attention of the man she loves?
“These bitter pages—which flay both the flesh and the heart—tell the story of a love which would rather commit suicide than leave itself to die. There is no doubt [with this first novel] an author is born.”
—Elle
Synopsis
"As an entomologist of the ways of love, [Dorner] has a rare precision . . . we devour her book, realizing that it shows the building and the destruction of a couple carried away by work and day-to-day concerns. Her story is our own, and that is why we love it."
-Paris Match
To save our marriage I tried offering him another woman. He has started fantasizing about her. He doesn't know it's me . . . and she is now destroying us.
Nina and Roger have a humdrum marriage, not helped by the pressures of their work running a newspaper kiosk on the shaded side of a busy street in Paris. Shuttling between her straight-laced husband, her selfish mother, the father she has never known, and her best friend who has—inconveniently—just split up with her brother-in-law, Nina decides one day to leaf through the girlie magazines she sells every day. She glimpses a world of pleasure and desire, and innocently believes she has found a way of rekindling something that may never have been there. As she explores her own longings and discovers how attractive she is to other men, how can she fail to win back the attention of the man she loves?
“These bitter pages—which flay both the flesh and the heart—tell the story of a love which would rather commit suicide than leave itself to die. There is no doubt [with this first novel] an author is born.”
—Elle
Publishers Weekly
The snappy, funny first novel by French playwright Dorner (awarded the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman last year) observes the sad, sweet machinations of a bored young working-class Parisian wife. Frustrated that her new husband, Roger, no longer seems to appreciate her, Nina takes a few lessons from the porn mags stocked at the couple's sidewalk newsstand. She begins flirting with the customers and, wearing a black wig, black raincoat and heavy orchid perfume, follows her husband to the movie theater. Dorner's colloquial first-person narrative, which feels like a riff on an early '60s film starring Catherine Deneuve, also charmingly navigates Nina's dutiful relationships with her needy, possessive mother; unhappy childhood friend Gisele; and the thick, unenlightened Roger. Moreover, Nina confronts the long, deeply scarring absence of her father, as this "invisible little woman" (as she mockingly describes herself) discovers the full flower of her femininity. As powerful feelings and further experimentation take hold, Dorner does a lovely job of showing the stakes in the marriage and its fault lines. (June 13) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.