Chloé Delaume

La vanité des somnanbules

The Vanity of the Somnanbules

January 1, 2003
Novel
147 pages
140 × 190 mm
15 €
9782844901156
978-2-8449-0115-6
																Chloé Delaume, La vanité des somnanbules
																Chloé Delaume, La vanité des somnanbules

Chloé Delaume is no ordinary fictional character. She is worse. Refusing to end her days in a book like her fellow creatures, she wandered for a long time in the limbo of Somnambulia. From there, she looked for the “mediator” in which to incarnate herself: a living body, which sinned by vacuity. Once the place has been taken over, no one will be able to dislodge it, except the body itself, if it can find enough strength or subterfuge to fight. The characters of fiction are much more malignant tumors than we think, which know how to besiege each organ with method. In order for the body to have the last word, it will have to preserve its own language, in spite of the plundering perpetrated. Through the alternating voices of the “narrative tapeworm” and the “hacked” body, La Vanité des Somnambules stages the conquest of an identity territory, the successive assaults of a cancer-nymph facing a body guilty of having used too much lie. A polyphonic fight at the borders of autofiction.

Farrago
The author

Chloé Delaume was born in 1973. She has been writing in many forms and media since the late 1990s. She has written nearly thirty books as if they were experiments: novels, poetic fragments, plays, essays, self-fiction. She is fond of hybrid objects and the mixing of genres: a novel illustrated by a video game (Corpus Simsi), the hijacking of a board game (Certainement pas), fan fiction in which you are the hero (La nuit je suis Buffy Summers). But also diary of a home performance (J’habite dans la télévision), dystopia (Les sorcières de la République). If her first novel, Les mouflettes d’Atropos, was tinged with radical feminism, she later focused on the issue of sisterhood by publishing Mes bien chères sœurs and the collective work Sororité.
Winner of the Prix Décembre 2001 for Le cri du sablier, she was a resident at the Villa Médicis in 2010-2011 and won the Prix Médicis 2020 with Le cœur synthétique.

January 1, 2003
Novel
147 pages
140 × 190 mm
15 €
9782844901156
978-2-8449-0115-6
Farrago