earlier two books, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French.
Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
Bordas has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.
At Electric Lit the author tagged seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill, including:
Painting Time by Maylis de KerangalRead about another title on the list.
I consider Maylis de Kerangal a French national treasure. Her writing is out of this world. Her sentences are immediately recognizable, inimitable in their mix of registers (colloquial, technical, lyrical)—they’re luscious and immersive. Even though she’s writing about people today, speaking normally, going about their lives, there is a sense that you’re reading mythology. I do not understand how she does it. I encountered her writing first in 2008, with her book Corniche Kennedy (which someone needs to translate into English!) and I was immediately mesmerized. As a reader, up to that point, I’d never really picturedanything while I read. The words I read would create emotional responses within me, not images. With Maylis de Kerangal, I picture everything.
Which is especially useful in Painting Time, a novel that follows Paula Karst’s journey from student at the Institut Supérieur de Peinture in Brussels (where she studies not “traditional” painting, but the at of trompe-l’oeil) to professional artist on theater and film sets. What I love about this book is how we see her reaching mastery, one trompe-l’oeil at a time, and how de Kerangal describes what mastery also creates space for: instinct. Instinct can be such a cheesy notion in fiction (novels and movies alike), but here, it rings true. The repetition of the same gestures, no matter how small, will change your body and your brain, the way they respond to the world. It’s not a plot point. Instinct, in itself, is a skill.
--Marshal Zeringue
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