Synopses & Reviews
Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.
A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters,
Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.
Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist, LGBT, and experimental literary canons appearing in English for the first time.
Review
"Almost every page amounts to tightrope-walking, whether nonchalant or fraught . . . considerably more than a language game." Adam Mars-Jones,
London Review of Books
"In this sense, just as the novel is genderless, it is also genderfull . . . Garréta finds endless shades of in between and out of bounds, her characters taking shapes no other text beforeor sincehas imagined." Lauren Elkin, Bookforumy
"[Garreta's] been called influential and groundbreaking, and with this, her first translation into English, it is easy to see why. Sphinx is an important contribution to queer literaturefascinating, intelligent, and very welcome." Lambda Literary
"For Garréta, it just may be possible then that the body occupies the space of language as powerfully as its capacity to produce it." Tyler Curtis, BOMB Magazine
"Sphinx is a novel of passion and loss that transcends gender and speaks to the universality of desire and loss, morality, spiritual crisis and the need to connect and belong. Its also a novel that captivates and propels the reader to question the boundaries of desire and memoryand which one ultimately holds us captive." Monica Carter, Three Percent
"Garrétas removal of gendered grammar is less an indictment of genderor sign-bearing bodiesand more of a narrative challenge, a queering of language. This is also to say Sphinx is less of a queer romance novel than it is a poetic queering of love itself." Meghan Lamb, The Collagist
One of the Dallas Observer's "13 Books to Read this Summer"
The Paris Review Staff Pick by Charlotte Groult
"The body may be divine, but it can only be seen in such close focus that individual limbs can hardly be distinguished: we are left with flesh and bone, plus a few spinning hormones." Joanna Walsh, The National
"I must start by saying that I simply devoured this book. Its romp through seamy Paris nightclubs; its exacting portrait of a passionate affair; and its exploration of both mileus with a deft mixture of immediacy and intellectual detachment had me absolutely obsessed with it I just had to know what was happening next." Tom Roberge, Albertine Books Staff Pick
"Sphinx is a novel of passion and loss that transcends gender and speaks to the universality of desire and loss, morality, spiritual crisis and the need to connect and belong. Its also a novel that captivates and propels the reader to question the boundaries of desire and memoryand which one ultimately holds us captive." Monica Carter, Three Percent
"Spectacular." Aaron Westerman, Typographical Era (5-star review)
"Quite remarkable, and a rewarding piece of experimentalin the best senses of the wordfiction." Complete Review
"Masterful...an extremely ambitious experiment pushing the boundaries of language." Sarah Coolidge, Zyzzyva
About the Author
Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalien (graduate of Frances prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel,
Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrators love interest, A***. Her second novel,
Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), told the fate of a character losing the use of language. In
La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999) , a serial killer methodically murdered characters from Marcel Prousts
In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won Frances prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award-Georges Perec won in 1978), for her latest novel,
Pas un jour (Grasset, 2002).
Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University, and received her Master's in Literary Translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.