Nancy Huston
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Nancy Huston
(b.1953). Born in Calgary, Alberta, she grew up there and in Edmonton. Her mother suddenly left the family when Huston was six, and her relationship to her mother-tongue is related, in her accounts, to that early abandonment. Her family moved to New England when she was in her teens and she attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She moved to Paris in 1973 and still lives there. Huston studied in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales with the leaders of post-structuralism, including Roland Barthes (her M.A. thesis, published as Dire et interdire, 1980, dealt with profanity). A sometime teacher—she has been visiting professor and guest lecturer at numerous universities and institutions in North America and Europe—she is married to the Bulgarian-born writer Tzvetan Todorov and has two children.
Huston has published six novels. Les variations Goldberg (1981, self-translated as The Goldberg Variations, 1996) was a tour de force; published after Barthes' death, it was dedicated to him. The novel's action lasts exactly an hour and a half, the time it takes Liliane Kulainn to play Bach's Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord before thirty friends and acquaintances at her Paris apartment; thirty-two inner monologues give voice to Liliane and her guests. Most of Huston's key themes—music, words, writing, passion, sex, the body, food, the passage of time, and the relationship between time and space—are launched here. A second novel, published in 1985, Histoire d'Omaya (with its ironic reference to Histoire d'O, the classic pornographic novel of a woman in love with her own abasement), presents, through fragment and collage, the psychic collapse of an already fragile young actress who was abducted and abused by a group of men and, having pressed charges against them, found herself on trial. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Trois fois septembre (1989) relates the descent into madness and the suicide of a young woman as seen through the eyes of a mother-daughter couple reading her journal and letters after the fact.
For Plainsong (1993) Huston drew for the first time on her childhood experiences of life in western Canada and found herself writing, also for the first time, fiction in English. This lyrical and desperate novel relates the narrator's attempts to reconstruct imaginatively her grandfather's life (resembling that of her father as related in Jouer au papa et à l'amant, 1979): an aspiring writer-philosopher, he soon found himself trapped in the role of husband, breadwinner, and father and lost the ability, but not the longing, to make an intellectual contribution. Huston rewrote the novel in French, and Cantique des plaines (1993) won a Governor General's Award. The prize sparked a controversy in Quebec literary circles—because it was a translation, because the author was not a Québécoise. Ironically, the angry protests from five Québécois publishers gave the novel heightened visibility, and won Huston many new readers. The lapidary and intense La virevolte (1994)—initially written in English, this version was not published until 1996 as Slow emergencies—is the story of mother-daughter love and abandonment across three generations and a meditation on the relationship between art (dance) and life. The same metamorphosis of the everyday into literature, pain into transcendence, is at the heart of Instruments des ténèbres (1996). The narrator, Nadia (Nada), alternately reflects on her own troubled past and present and writes a novel, inserted in the text, about a young servant girl who killed her newborn child in eighteenth-century France. It was nominated for the Prix Goncourt, won the Goncourt des lycées, and was chosen as one of the twelve best books of 1996 by the Paris magazine Lire. A translation, Instruments of darkness, was published in 1997.
Huston's greatest strength as an author of non-fiction is her ability to write both as an intellectual and as a woman who refuses the structuralist premise that the text is a purely imaginative construction with no connection to, and no impact on, real life. Much of her early non-fiction deals with the complex links between sex, language, and power, documenting male domination of women through pornography (Mosaïque de la pornographie, 1982) and unequal and eroticized power relations (Jouer au papa et à l'amant). She has returned often to the mind-body, man-woman split that permeates all Western thought and has damaged both men and women. À l'amour comme à la guerre (1984), letters between Huston and the American historian Samuel Kinser, looks at the symbolic relationships between Mars and Venus, and at war, motherhood, and prostitution. Journal de la création (1990) combines case studies of famous writing couples and the symbolic roles each member played, musings on Huston's past physical and mental ailments and their symbolic meaning and function, and the diary of her second pregnancy and its impact on her body, life, thoughts, and writing. Exile has become another important theme of Huston's work, particularly in Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil (1986), written with the Algerian-French writer Leïla Sebbar. In a similar vein, Tombeau de Romain Gary (1995) is a highly personal portrait of a writer obsessed with reinventing himself between and among languages, countries, identities, and writing styles.
Although she is spectacularly fluent in, and writes in, two languages, Huston says she is not at home in either of them. She has written movingly of her self-translation, a kind of bilingual writing and rewriting with no true source or target language, and of her hesitations, possibilities, and impossibilities in using French as a literary language. It is precisely this in-between, uncomfortable, and yet vital position that is the source of her considerable creative energy.
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Nancy Huston
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Nancy Huston
| Nancy Huston | |
|---|---|
| Born | 16 September 1953 Calgary, Canada |
| Occupation | Novelist, Translator |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Period | 21st century |
| Spouse(s) | Tzvetan Todorov |
Nancy Louise Huston, OC (born September 16, 1953) is a Canadian-born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French and translates her own works into English.[1]
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Contents
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Biography
Huston was born in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, the city in which she lived until age fifteen, at which time her family moved to Wilton, New Hampshire, USA. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she was given the opportunity to spend a year of her studies in Paris. Arriving in Paris in 1973, Huston obtained a Master's Degree from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing a thesis on swear words under the supervision of Roland Barthes.[2]
Ms. Huston lives in Paris with her husband Tzvetan Todorov and their two children.[3]
Career
Because French was a language acquired at school and university, Huston found that the combination of her eventual command of the language and her distance from it as a non-native speaker helped her to find her literary voice. Since 1980, Huston has published over 45 books of fiction and non-fiction, including theatre and children's books. Some of her publications are self-translations of previously published works. Essentially she writes in French and subsequently self-translates into English but Plainsong (1993) was written first in English and then self-translated to French as Cantique des plaines (1993) - it was, however, the French version which first found a publisher.
She has 25 fiction publications, of which 13 are original fiction and 11 are self-translations.
In her fiction, only Trois fois septembre (1989), Visages de l'aube (2001) and Infrarouge (2010), as well as her three children's books, have not been published in English. She has also published two plays but has not yet translated either.
She has 14 non-fiction publications, of which 12 are original publications and two are self-translations. The other ten non-fiction publications have not yet been self-translated.
While Huston's often controversial works of non-fiction have been well-received, her fiction has earned her the most critical acclaim. Her first novel, Les variations Goldberg (1981), was awarded the Prix Contrepoint and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina. She translated this novel into English as The Goldberg Variations (1996).
Her next major award came in 1993 when she was received the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction in French for Cantique des Plaines (1993). This was initially contested as it was a translation of Plainsong (1993), but Huston demonstrated that it was an adaptation and kept the prize. A subsequent novel, La virevolte (1994), won the Prix "L" and the Prix Louis-Hémon. It was published in English in 1996 as Slow Emergencies.[4]
Huston's novel, Instruments des ténèbres, has been her most successful novel yet, being shortlisted for the Prix Femina, and the Governor General's Award. It was awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens.
In 1998, she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for her novel L'Empreinte de l'ange. The next year she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for translating the work into English as The Mark of the Angel.
In 1999, she appeared in the film Emporte-moi, also collaborating on the screenplay.
Her works have been translated into many languages from Chinese to Russian.
In 2005, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada,[5] and she received the Prix Femina in 2006 for the novel Lignes de faille and which, as Fault Lines, has been published by Atlantic Books and is shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize.[6]
Her latest novel is Infrarouge (2010).
In 2007, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège.
In 2010, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa.[7]
Selected works
Fiction:
- The Goldberg Variations (1996) = self-translation of Les variations Goldberg (1981)
- The Story of Omaya (1987) = self-translation of Histoire d'Omaya (1985)
- Trois fois septembre (1989) [no English self-translation]
- Plainsong (1993) = Cantique des plaines (self-translation)(1993)
- Slow Emergencies (1996) = self-translation of La Virevolte (1994)
- Instruments of Darkness (1997) = self-translation of Instruments des ténèbres (1996)
- The Mark of the Angel (1998) = self-translation of L'empreinte de l'ange (1988)
- Prodigy: A Novella (2000) = self-translation of Prodige : polyphonie (1999)
- Limbes/Limbo (2000) [bilingual edition]
- Visages de l'aube (2001) [with Valérie Winckler - no English version]
- Dolce Agonia (2001) = self-translation of the French version Dolce agonia (2001), cover illustration by Ralph Petty
- An Adoration(2003) = self-translation of Une adoration (2003)
- Fault Lines (2007) = self-translation of Lignes de faille (2006)
- Infrarouge (2010) [no English self-translation - yet]
Theatre:
- Angela et Marina (2002) [with Valérie Grail - no English self-translation]
- Jocaste reine (2009) [no English self-translation]
Non-fiction:
- Jouer au papa et à l'amant (1979) [no English self-translation]
- Dire et interdire : éléments de jurologie (1980) [no English self-translation]
- Mosaïque de la pornographie : Marie-Thérèse et les autres (1982) [no English self-translation]
- Journal de la création (1990)[no English self-translation]
- Tombeau de Romain Gary (1995) [no English self-translation]
- Pour un patriotisme de l'ambiguïté (1995) [no English self-translation]
- Nord perdu : suivi de Douze France (1999)
- Losing north: musings on land, tongue and self (2002) [self-translation of Nord perdu : suivi de Douze France]
- Professeurs de désespoir (2004) [no English self-translation]
- Passions d'Annie Leclerc (2007) [no English self-translation]
- L'espèce fabulatrice (2008)
- The Tale-Tellers: A Short Study of Humankind (2008) [self-translation of L'espèce fabulatrice]
Correspondence:
- À l'amour comme à la guerre (1984) [no English version]
- Lettres parisiennes : autopsie de l'exil [with Leila Sebbar] (1986) [no English version]
Selected texts:
- Désirs et réalités : textes choisis 1978-1994 (1995) [no English version]
- Âmes et corps : textes choisis 1981-2003 (2004) [no English version]
Children's fiction:
- Véra veut la vérité (1994) [with Léa Huston & Willi Glasauer - no English version]
- Dora demande des détails (1997) [with Léa Huston & Pascale Bougeault - no English version]
- Les souliers d'or (1998) [no English self-translation]
References
- ^ Nancy Huston @ Random House
- ^ Nancy Huston entry at Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ "Biography - Nancy Huston: A view from both sides". The Independent (London). 22 February 2008. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/biography--nancy-huston-a-view-from-both-sides-785331.html.
- ^ Author Profile: Nancy Huston
- ^ Nancy Huston invested as Officer of the Order of Canada
- ^ "Heather O'Neill, Nancy Huston in running for U.K.'s Orange Prize". CBC News. March 18, 2008. http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2008/03/18/orange-prize.html.
- ^ Outstanding individuals to receive honorary doctorates at University of Ottawa spring convocation, University of Ottawa Website, 3 June 2010
Eugene Benson and William Toye, eds. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Second Edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997: 564-565. ISBN 0-19-541167-6
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