Ah, what would the French 'rentrée littéraire' -- the fall release of a flood of French fiction -- be without a good scandal, preferably tinged with sex, lawsuits, and depictions of real people in 'fiction' ?
No contest: this season's early frontrunner is Simon Liberati's Eva.
Simon Liberati -- whose Anthology of Apparitions Pushkin Press brought out a few years ago -- is a French author, and his new book, Eva, is due out from Stock on 19 August; see their foreign rights page.
Simon Liberati is married to Eva Ionesco -- no relation, apparently, to Eugene, but notoriously the daughter of photographer Irina.
The Wikipedia entry succinctly summarizes how mom 'guided' Eva's career:
Mom lost custody in 1977, and Eva made a film about her childhood a couple of years ago, starring Isabelle Huppert as her mother, My Little Princess; see the IMDb page. (The Germans, always more to the point (unverblümt, shall we say ?), released the film as I'm Not a F**king Princess -- apparently asterisked, but still .....)
Now husband Simon Liberati apparently retells the Eva-story -- and Irina is seeking an injunction. There are 69 lines she finds objectionable, an invasion of privacy. So: Le «meilleur roman» de la rentrée sera-t-il interdit ? wonders Marie-Claude Martin in Le Temps, while Raphaëlle Leyris considers Vie privée, vie publique et littérature au tribunal in Le Monde. 15,000 copies of the book have been printed (and many already distributed); any judgement in favor of Irina would mean a costly recall, pulping , and reprinting -- a "mort du livre", for all intents and purposes, as Liberati's counsel argues.
A judgement (in the first instance) is due on Friday.
No doubt, you'll be hearing more about this.
No contest: this season's early frontrunner is Simon Liberati's Eva.
Simon Liberati -- whose Anthology of Apparitions Pushkin Press brought out a few years ago -- is a French author, and his new book, Eva, is due out from Stock on 19 August; see their foreign rights page.
Simon Liberati is married to Eva Ionesco -- no relation, apparently, to Eugene, but notoriously the daughter of photographer Irina.
The Wikipedia entry succinctly summarizes how mom 'guided' Eva's career:
She is the youngest model ever to appear in a Playboy nude pictorial, since she was featured at age 11 in the October 1976 issue of the Italian edition [.....] Her story served as inspiration for Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby.The 1977 cover photograph of Eva for the mass-circulation Der Spigel is so shocking (and certainly illegal today) that they've purged it from their archives (it was the 22/1977 cover); you can find it online, if you really feel you have to, but, yeah, that was not okay, and you have to wonder about a time when it was okay to display that at your local newsstand (okay, your local German newsstand, which was admittedly never exactly up to Walmart-uptight standards).
Mom lost custody in 1977, and Eva made a film about her childhood a couple of years ago, starring Isabelle Huppert as her mother, My Little Princess; see the IMDb page. (The Germans, always more to the point (unverblümt, shall we say ?), released the film as I'm Not a F**king Princess -- apparently asterisked, but still .....)
Now husband Simon Liberati apparently retells the Eva-story -- and Irina is seeking an injunction. There are 69 lines she finds objectionable, an invasion of privacy. So: Le «meilleur roman» de la rentrée sera-t-il interdit ? wonders Marie-Claude Martin in Le Temps, while Raphaëlle Leyris considers Vie privée, vie publique et littérature au tribunal in Le Monde. 15,000 copies of the book have been printed (and many already distributed); any judgement in favor of Irina would mean a costly recall, pulping , and reprinting -- a "mort du livre", for all intents and purposes, as Liberati's counsel argues.
A judgement (in the first instance) is due on Friday.
No doubt, you'll be hearing more about this.