Nativity

Reviews / Votes

'How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Fremon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to represent the saviour of humankind without his swaddling clothes. The book is a miniature portrait in itself, running for fewer than 50 pages and punctuated by a series of evocative drawings by the artist Louise Bourgeois. With the bells of Christmas ringing faintly in the distance, Nativity offers a stylish, expressive new study into artistic representations of Christianity's founding story.' - The Arts Desk; 'Fremon's decision to focus on a painter and his mission brings something very personal to the history encompassed within this short essay (...) [t]he five paintings by Bourgeois are made up of red brushstrokes, and depict the more human side of the Christmas story: a child swelling in the womb, a birth, a hungry newborn (...) The reflections are compelling and lucidly composed; in contrast the representations offered by Bourgeois are carnal, showing that for all the divine wonder of the Nativity, it is also the story of a first-time mother giving birth in extraordinary - and probably terrifying - circumstances.' - Helen Vassalo, Translating Women; 'A perfectly pitched medley of fact and fiction' - Times Literary Supplement; 'The nativity that Fremon's work is deeply indebted to and preoccupied with is that of artistic ideas - the naissance of a way of thinking, of seeing, of representing - and the cultural precedent they subsequently set in motion. (...) Fremon's inclusion of Bourgeois' drawings not only speaks directly into art history's marked exclusion and omission of women from this tradition, but also rights it by having Bourgeois have her say on birth and motherhood.' - Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, Lucy Writers; Praise for Jean Fremon: 'Jean Fremon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet.' (Paul Auster); 'Like all the most urgent poetry, it is "fragile and momentary, but momentarily invincible.' (John Ashberry); Praise for Now, Now, Louison (Les Fugitives, 2018): 'A truly wonderful book... The spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the good girl sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. There is something uncanny at play in this small book, something I don't fully grasp, but I suspect that elusive, haunted excess may be exactly why I love it.' (Siri Hustvedt); 'A sensitive portrait of a woman whose struggle for self- definition came to drive her artistic practice.' (Financial Times (Best Books of 2018, Translated Fiction)); 'A perfectly pitched medley of fact and fiction.' (Times Literary Supplement); 'Perhaps life, this life, any life, is best preserved in its many bits, just as it was lived.' (Frieze); 'This enchanting short book (...) is simultaneously a love letter, an elegy, a poem, a novel, a fictionalised biography.' (Michele Roberts, for The Tablet's Best Books of 2018); 'A compulsive, daringly perceptive, sometimes astringent exploration of the role, power and symbolism of maternity, fertility, sublimation and reality, ecstasy and happiness, silence and the overcrowding bustle of belonging; of hysteria and emotionality, of how to give material substance to presence, to nothingness and the void.' (Bookanista); 'Cole Swensen's greatest accomplishments in Now, Now, Louison stem from her complex engagement with the relationship between fidelity and translation.' (Asymptote); French reviews: 'Jean Fremon brings Louise Bourgeois close up into a fascinating and moving proximity.' (ArtPress); 'The life of Louise Bourgeois is rendered in ellipsis, quick brush strokes, and a mix of associations of ideas and of sensations waltzing with chronology. A highly original, sensitive text.' (Liberation).