In her frank, spare style, with its transporting particulars, she told me an anecdote about a reluctant visit she had made to a writer acquaintance's death bed in a Paris hospital that might have been the best story anyone has ever told me. It somehow straightened and reordered something inside me. Even though I am a writing professor, I had forgotten the power of stories to do this.
Schneck's writing is sinewy, tough, sharp. The memoir comes out of a distinctly French tradition that includes writers such as Françoise Sagan, Marguerite Duras, and Annie Ernaux. This is a tradition of lean prose; the sentences are evocative, stylish, direct. In stripping away excess self-reflection, these books give us the bones of the story.
#colombe-schneck #french-writing-tradition #honesty-in-writing #power-of-storytelling #spare-prose-style
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