Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine De Vigan

Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine De Vigan

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic, in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine was left to wonder: What changed her, or what shaped her all along? In this brilliant investigation into her own family history, Delphine de Vigan attempts to "write her mother," seeking out something essential as she interviews aging relatives, listens to recordings, and reads Lucile's own writings. It is a history of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences. There are untimely deaths and failures of memory. There are revelations and there is the ultimately unknowable. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction: De Vigan must choose from differing accounts and fill in important gaps, using her writer's imagination to reconstruct a life. De Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is a remarkable work, universally recognizable and singularly heartbreaking.

Devastating ambivalent narrative, an emphatic and candid family memoir that is presented as autofiction.. An unsettling and raw monologue, even more so because of the cool control de Vigan sustains ... The only way to read this book is to stop, put it down, gasp, absorb the horrors and then read on. Shortlisted for eight major literary awards in France, it won two, and it is easy to see why. It is an overpowering work, almost impossible to assess because of the extreme behaviour described. The urgent, somewhat relentless narrative draws one in yet repels through its extraordinarily clear-eyed emotional intelligence. Is it an act of love or a plea for forgiveness?... As an account of mental illness this book is bold and ambitious, but it is as a study of one lost woman’s struggle to get through the days, the hours, the years that de Vigan’s not always sympathetic portrait of her doomed, bizarrely heroic mother will physically, never mind intellectually, leave a reader shaken and affected. How many books can do that? * Eileen Battersby, Irish Times *
Absolutely stunning. This remarkable book is not a memoir, a biography, an analysis or a novel: it is all these and more. It is about the struggle to weave sense out of mutinous threads, how silence breeds crisis, how we are made and unmade. “Gauging the extent of the mystery” that was her mother, de Vigan strips the psychodrama of family ties – the basis of every human life – to the bone * Janice Galloway *
Delphine de Vigan is a sensation * Observer *
Thrilling, tender ... A genuinely shocking, incandescent read * Janice Galloway, Scotland on Sunday *
Her portrait of the mother, Lucile, … Is compassionate and powerful, as well as painful and shocking ... The luminous accuracy of the prose reminds me of Colette … the mixture of reported reminiscence, family legend and empathetic invention is so effective, the Poirier family – parents and children – appear in a kind of Renoir sunlight, overflowing with life and vibrant personalities, almost enough to conceal the lurking darkness * Ursula Le Guin, Guardian *
De Vigan never spares her own self-absorption in her repellently irresistible investigation of a life that amounted to symphonic self-destruction yet achieved a bizarre and compelling heroism * Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Books of the Year *

Delphine de Vigan is the author of No and Me, which was a bestseller in France (400,000 copies) and was awarded the Prix des Libraires (The Booksellers' Prize) in 2008 and in Britain was a Richard and Judy selection where it has sold more than 70,000 copies. Her other novels include Les Jolis Garçons and Soir de décembre. Underground Time was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize in 2009. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Paris.

George Miller is the translator of No and Me and Underground Time. He is also a regular translator for Le Monde diplomatique's English-language edition, and the translator of Conversations with my Gardener by Henri Cueco, Inside Al-Qaeda by Mohammed Sifaoui and Disordered World by Amin Maalouf.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781408825730
ISBN 10	1408825732
Title	Nothing Holds Back the Night
Author	Delphine De Vigan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2013-08-01
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.